Five Questions Transformational Leaders and PMOs Should Address When Driving Digital

Let’s consider the modern Project Management Office or PMO and what transformational leaders need from this function when driving digital transformation programs.

The Role of the PMO Before Transformation
In many organizations, the PMO is synonymous with bureaucracy and administration since many focus on tracking projects, managing budgets, defining project management standards, and overseeing risk mitigation. These responsibilities are often misaligned with executives that centralized PMOs expecting that they would drive execution. Centralizing a “one throat to choke” responsible for project execution is often ill suited for today’s projects that are more agile, involve resources across multiple departments, and often require support from vendors and partners.

Regarding project administrative, today, many needs can be streamlined as much of the tracking, reporting and risk mitigation functions are more delivered in today’s agile tools. For example, burndown charts and other status reports are readily accessible to leaders, managers, and team participants when teams are committed to updating these tools with some regularity.

Now for larger organizations, there should be a leading group that creates the governance and standards for managing agile initiatives, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be done by a centralized PMO. It can be a center of excellence comprised of members from multiple teams that not only defines these standards but also addresses the practices and culture of the teams to become more data driven and follow best practices.

What Transformational Leaders Need from a PMO
So this begs the question of whether the PMO is an obsolete organizational function. I’m not here to answer that question because every organization is different and some will benefit from centralizing this function.
But whether you have a PMO or elect to delegate their responsibilities across multiple leaders, there are some key new responsibilities for the PMO in organizations that are driving digital transformation. Here are my five key questions a PMO and transformation leaders need to master when driving digital transformation

What’s minimally required to plan a new initiative? – Many organizations are adopting agile to manage their transformation initiatives, but that doesn’t mean that a new initiative can begin without some upfront planning.