Project Management Offices (PMO) have gotten a bad rap as "The Methodology Police", much of it deserved. The Strategic PMO, however, is meant to help organizations deliver projects to their business targets effectively, while maintaining balanced portfolios. They should be the executive's window into portfolio performance. And they should be every project manager's best friend, listening and providing consistent methodologies that help them become heroes for delivering on-time, on-budget, and on-target. We see PMOs playing in four major areas:

Portfolio Management: Setting the table

Portfolio Management contains two major practice areas.

Project Intake compares incoming potential projects and selects the best candidates based on business strategies and organization capacity.

Portfolio Review monitors the "in-flight" projects for performance and continually re-balances the portfolio.

Resource Planning: matching supply to demand

Resource Planning interacts with the Project Intake process to match available staff capacity with the project demand load. It also interacts with Portfolio Review to ensure the organization does not reach "overload".

Project Management: Consistenly delivering the business goods

Once projects are selected and matched against capacity, they need to get from start to finish. Sound project management methodologies provide a consistent way to repeatedly deliver the business goods on-time, on-budget, and on-target.

Value: Creating real business value through PPM

If the PMO sets the table properly without overloading the organization, then projects can proceed from start to finish without interuption or "churn". In turn, the entire organization becomes more efficient and delivers more business value.