What is a Project or Program Management Office (PMO)?
Posted on August 16, 2012
A PMO is an organizational structure — either physical or virtual — staffed by project management experts who serve their organization’s project and program management needs. It also serves as an organizational center for project management excellence. A PMO may exist in any one of three forms in the organization (or in all three concurrently).
Type 1: The project control office
A Type 1 PMO typically manages a single large, complex program (or megaproject) that often requires multiple schedules needing to be integrated into an overall project/program schedule.
Type 2: Business unit (or departmental) PMO
A Type 2 PMO integrates multiple projects and/or programs of varying sizes within a business unit or department from small, short-term initiatives to multi-month or multi-year initiatives that require dozens of resources and complex integration of technologies.
Type 3: Enterprise PMO
A Type 3 PMO serves as a repository for the standards, processes, and methodologies that improve project performance across the enterprise. It also serves to mitigate conflicts in the competition for resources. It allows the organization to manage its entire collection of projects as one or more interrelated portfolios so executive management can get the big picture of all project activity across the enterprise from a central source. A Type 3 PMO infuses a project management culture throughout the organization, and, in its more sophisticated versions, plays a key role in tracking and executing corporate strategy.
Source: Crawford, J.K. (2010). The Strategic Project Office: A Guide to Improving Organizational Performance, Second Edition. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
