PMO, defined as the Project Management Office, is designed to meet the needs for delivering various types of initiatives. These may be programs or other projects. Different acronyms, including: can represent them
PfMO: Portfolio Management Office
PgMO: Program Management Office
PMO: Project Management Office
EPMO: Enterprise Project Management Office
Ultimately, the core objectives of all these offices are similar. Much as organizations come in various shapes and sizes, and with different organizational mandates, so do PMOs. Regardless of the offices’ their title, quite often, offices oversee a combination of portfolios, programs, and projects.
Sometimes, in complex or technology-driven organizations, an Enterprise Portfolio Management office is created to oversee interdependent portfolios and their components on an enterprise scale.
What is the PMO role?
PMO maintains an enterprise delivery approach that outlines stakeholder responsibilities and describes what they must do to deliver the initiative(s) successfully. To achieve their mandates, most PMOs are tasked with two main objectives.
- The first is to act as the Center of Excellence for the project-, program-, and portfolio-management practitioners.
- The second is to maintain company-specific delivery methodologies that describe the activities required to ensure that programs and projects are delivered effectively and with the least risk.
These methodologies need to be repeatable to apply what has worked well in the past to portfolio, program, and project delivery. During operations, the PMO extends support to the program- and project-management practitioners during the delivery of their initiatives and, when needed, leverage organizational relationships already established by PMO.