With cloud-based project portfolio management software, project management offices can gain visibility into both strategic initiatives and sustaining operations, resulting in clear visibility into operations, effective prioritization, and better decision-making across the entire portfolio.
A Project Management Office (PMO) doesn’t always achieve its full potential. Project managers often find themselves short on resources, time and money, which can lead to delivering projects late or incomplete. Without visibility into business goals, the PMO is unable to align project priorities with the long-term strategic requirements of the business. We’ve seen PMOs even fall short on their initial promise to define and standardize processes and practices, which makes it difficult to leverage institutional knowledge or to reduce the effects of complex operational challenges.
PMOs that are successful are able to overcome a host of challenges, including:
- Insight into ongoing operations
- Ability to support best practice methodologies
- Departmental silos of information
- Incorrect alignment with enterprise strategy and priorities
- Prioritizing requirements
- Visibility into financial measurements
- Effective communications
To help the PMO successfully deliver on strategic initiatives, companies are coming to the realization that in addition to managing projects and methodologies, the PMO must also lend equal time to managing shared resources across multiple projects as well as sustaining operations.
In order to clarify demand on available resources and define and enable prioritization, the PMO needs to be able to see the impact of sustaining operations, as well as strategic projects, total demands on resources, timelines, budgets, and critical path to completion.
