Webinar Recap: Why is Setting a PMO Necessary with the Growt

March 13th, 2020 by Thea Maisuradze

On March 10, 2020 Inflectra and Sriram Rajagopalan hosted a live webinar: Why is Setting a PMO Necessary with the Growth of Agile?

If you missed the webinar, here is a recap blog to catch you up.

WEBINAR TAKEAWAYS:

Why have a central body of excellence regardless of delivery framework
How to differentiate the various flavors of PMO structure
What are the essential characteristics of PMO
How to set up a PMO

Scroll down to view the recording.

THEORY BEHIND THE WEBINAR:

The Importance of Processes

In a corporate environment increasingly seeing the growth of agile approaches to project delivery, it is natural for people to question why a structured project management office is necessary. After all, when the Agile Manifesto values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, aren’t we inherently undervaluing agile by promoting a structured PMO?

The Project Management Institute noted in 2017 that organizations wasted about US$ 97 million due to poor project performance for every US $1 billion invested in projects. This number changed to $1 million wasted almost every 20 seconds due to poor project performance. Among the various organizations surveyed globally, only 12% of these organizations had an enterprise-wide PMO aligned to organizational strategy claiming success in their projects. One may wonder if organizations had embraced agile, they would have had more promising results.

In the illustration comparing 2019 performance with 2018 performance of organizations need to go with Agile, according to Version 1 survey results, organizations see a declining trend in good software quality, better business/IT alignment or increased productivity. With almost a couple of decades of experience (Recall that Agile Manifesto was written in 2001), why has not Agile solved this dilemma with insurmountable success? If you have reviewed our earlier webinars in our “Journey into Agile with Inflectra” series, several patterns can be attributed to the process framework that governs the successful delivery of projects regardless of the project delivery.

PMO sows the success seeds

As we look proactively for building successful projects, the PMO becomes the primary interface for both organizational strategy alignment and operations management. Whether it is prototyping and developing new products or enhancing existing products iteratively and incrementally, leveraging lessons learned at the end of every phase from multiple stakeholders beyond the delivery team, improving process efficiency through operational excellence supporting the product throughout its life cycle stages requires different types of processes.

These processes may require the evaluation of the tools used, such as the Project Management Information System (PMIS), application lifecycle management (ALM), and integration with a variety of rapid semi-automated test case authoring and execution, continuous integration and deployment (CICD). These processes may expand to harvesting knowledge for capacity, transition, and succession planning, quality assurance, and audit support, and continuous education and training.

In this webinar, we will review the three levels of PMO offering different levels of support in five different stages.