2012 PMO Research Study: Interesting Answers, Intriguing New Questions

If you did not see it, our The State of the PMO 2012 research report was released March 6. The summary report can be downloaded here.

Like any research study, The State of the PMO is designed around questions. Some of the questions we had in mind when we developed the survey included:

• Do companies have PMOs? For how long?
• What’s their service span?
• What functions are performed by PMOs?
• How large are PMO staffs? How experienced?
• Do PMOs provide training? If so, what types of training? And how much?
• What challenges face PMOs?
• What value does a PMO add?
• What are organizations' priorities for the coming year?

The results answer some of these questions resoundingly. For example, we learned that PMOs continue to proliferate: with each study, a higher percentage of firms have one in place. New to this study, though, was a large pool of smaller businesses (revenues < $100 million) implementing PMOs.

We also saw that there are some pervasive challenges, particularly in the area of resource management, which has been and continues to be one of the top areas of difficulty for PMOs.

With a larger than ever pool of responses (over 500 PMO leaders participated) the findings carry significant weight. However, a large influx of smaller companies, with younger PMOs, may also have made the results harder to interpret. So, for the past week, I've been doing a little follow-up qualitative research, interviewing some of the participants in the survey by phone, delving a little deeper into the numbers. Here were some findings from those interviews that surprised me.

What downturn? Each of the dozen PMO leaders I interviewed said that their sponsoring organization was in good shape despite the economy. The general sense was of strong companies not only continuing to grow - primarily via merger and acquisitions - but poised for a major leap forward. Not only that, but none of the PMOs had experienced loss of staff or funding for economic reasons. Most of them, indeed, had added personnel. Which leads to the next finding ...

What unemployment? The main issue facing my interviewees was the difficulty of finding experienced staff, not at the entry level, but at the senior PM, Program Manager, and senior business analyst level.

These two findings somewhat inform what we learned from the statistical side of the research, in that all but one of the interviewees came from very mature PMOs of several years' standing - a quarter of them were in place for over 10 years. We had surmised that the large pool of newer, smaller PMOs somewhat affected the trending, and the interviews bear this out.

Read the research and have thoughts or questions about it? Please comment or email. We're always happy to discuss the ins and outs of the numbers.