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In a large organization, project teams operate in smaller silos that involve a segment of the company. But with so many moving parts in an enterprise, it’s easy for these teams to lose sight of how they factor into the larger business strategy.
The opposite is also true: When executives take a look at how disparate projects and business objectives are contributing to a company’s overarching strategy, it can be difficult to ensure that these projects are working toward the same goals—unless you have a solution in place to monitor this alignment and manage the execution of your enterprise strategy.
An enterprise project management office (EPMO) fills exactly this role, offering a strategy-level view of the company to centralize projects and strategy execution, ensuring goals alignment and business transformation at any scale. With this team in place, organizations can make better decisions on what projects are taken on and implement management processes that enable rapid change even at large organizations.
If you’re new to the concept of an enterprise PMO, here are five ways this solution can help with your change management.
How an Enterprise PMO Can Improve Change Management
1. Improving portfolio reporting
Portfolio reporting is a core process in managing projects and ensuring that disparate activities remain aligned with deadlines and other objectives.
Portfolio reporting at this level brings an EPMO into a role that is facilitated for creating and implementing a long-term strategy for better integration of changes, as well as the ability to recast workflows and other aspects of project management to better support the end result.
With an enterprise PMO, organizations have a designated function to manage all portfolios and projects across the enterprise. Having this enterprise-level perspective into all portfolios improves the insight needed for decision-making and change management across the organization. This program office brings accounting and analysis skills to also improve proposed project and completed portfolio ROI and inform what changes need to be made to get a bigger return.
2. Aligning strategic objectives across a large organization
Think of an enterprise PMO as a PMO for your PMOs. At most enterprises, a number of PMOs are routinely used to organize smaller projects within the organization. A recent Gartner survey of portfolio and project management leaders said their organizations used an average of nine PMOs in their typical workflows.
Ninety-one percent of those respondents said their organizations had an EPMO in place, allowing a strategy-level view of how these various PMO solutions are contributing toward larger business goals.
3. Streamlining responsiveness, even at scale
Large, complex organizations can struggle with a lack of agility. This makes it difficult to implement changes of any kind. Whether you’ve shifted business goals or are implementing a broader cultural change at the organization, the many moving parts of an enterprise can slow down the implementation of these changes.
An enterprise PMO can support improved oversight when implementing these changes because it isn’t bogged down in the day-to-day of a more technical PMO. Policy changes, new compliance guidelines, and faster iterations of new project initiatives are just some of the ways an EPMO can turn a large, sluggish organization into a finely tuned, responsive machine.
4. Improving communication and collaboration across departments
Individual PMOs can operate within a silo. Even when projects incorporate team members from multiple departments, the projects themselves often live in isolation, cut off from other projects and portfolios—even when their performance and end results have an effect on one another.
An EPMO makes this communication and collaboration easier. By breaking down the walls that separate projects, project managers and team members can better coordinate their activities to align with other related projects. This can enable better decision-making, a better allocation of internal resources, and improved vision and execution of business-wide strategic initiatives.
The broad view of an enterprise PMO doesn’t benefit only executives—it helps the entire organization see and understand its goals.
5. Completing projects on time and within budget
Improved workflows and workflow management, streamlined communications, efficient resource allocation, and broader executive buy-in all support the same goal of making projects faster, more efficient, and more productive for the organization. By creating an EPMO, your organization is creating an office with the goal of implementing solutions to support increased efficiency and will have a better platform to complete projects on time, and within your intended budget.
The cost savings, including resources, money, and human labor, will bolster your company’s bottom line while broadening your horizons as you consider future options for business transformation.
Conclusion
A single project is a complex endeavor involving a wide range of tasks, business strategies, applications, capabilities, and people. Multiply this structure by however many projects take place at your enterprise organization, and the complexity of project management grows exponentially.
To pursue business transformation while ensuring efficiency and streamlined operations, enterprise organizations need simple, smart solutions to map out these processes and monitor activity. If your organization currently lacks an enterprise PMO, it’s time to consider what’s getting lost in the shuffle.
When you want to grow, pivot, or correct your path, change is the critical element for your organization. EPMOs can help diagnose the opportunities and needs to facilitate this complex endeavor.
