2012 PMO Forecast: Cloudy, with A Bright Horizon

November 29, 2011 | by J. Kent Crawford

This is the time of year when, although our personal energies may be focused on home and family for the holidays, our business energies leapfrog over the year's end: forecasts and budgets for 2012 loom large. What trends should we capitalize upon? What risks can we plan to dodge?

Forecasting - both business and weather - has gotten more dicey in recent years. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that the challenges facing PMO leaders will not so much change as intensify over the coming 12 months. After a history of creating "stealth enterprise PMOs" by implementing organizational change from the bottom up, project management leaders are increasingly called upon to engage with the C-level. The failure to execute strategies is a key business problem that plagues our organizations, and it can be addressed when project, program and portfolio management are appropriately deployed. But the will to apply these tools has to come from the top, and project management has traditionally had a tough time "selling" itself to executives.

The present challenge for PMO leaders is to engage at the strategic level, communicating the benefits of program and portfolio management in language that resonates with executives. To do that, we must move beyond project performance to business performance. How do well-executed projects and programs impact the business metrics that are most critical to your company? How does optimizing resources and managing demand across the portfolio of strategic projects save money or improve time to market? Measure the right things and communicate the value proposition clearly.

We have in our hands a critical resource for moving business and government ahead, even in tough times. The logic of project management, as Tom Peters once remarked, is "unstoppable." It's up to us to start it rolling, though.

A good place to start: Check out PM Solutions' resources on Strategy Execution, Portfolio Management, Resource Management and Value Measurement. Share these resources widely and incorporate our research-based approaches in your communication with executives. Clear communication of our discipline's benefits will make the horizon brighter for both the grassroots and the C-suite.  

About the Author

J. Kent Crawford

Kent Crawford is the founder and CEO of Project Management Solutions, Inc. (PM Solutions) and PM College. His experience spans more than twenty five years, where he has been responsible for the development of systems requirements and the functional design of integrated project management systems for a number of Fortune 500 organizations. He is the Former President and Chair of the Project Management Institute (PMI®). During his tenure in office, Mr. Crawford implemented innovative programs, which resulted in an astounding fifty percent membership growth for the Institute. His leadership in PMI has been widely recognized as a primary driver in PMI's success. Mr. Crawford is a recipient of the PMI Fellow Award, PMI's highest and most prestigious individual honor. A prolific speaker and advocate of the profession, he is also the award-winning author of The Strategic Project Office: A Guide to Improving Organizational Performance (for which he won a David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award from PMI), Optimizing Human Capital with a Strategic Project Office, Project Management Maturity Model: Providing a Proven Path to Project Management Excellence, and Project Management Roles & Responsibilities.

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1 Comment on 2012 PMO Forecast: Cloudy, with A Bright Horizon

soni says:

yes, key objective is “communication for achieving program and portfolio management benefits”.

thanks for nice writeup!
soni
<a>Amandustechnologies</a>

Posted on January 30, 2012 at 6:54 am

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