Strategies to Leverage a PMO For Your Next Technology Implementation
Deborah Aguilar, PMP, CSM, BHSA, Lean Six Sigma 
Project Managers are often underappreciated and underutilized because their knowledge and expertise are misunderstood. According to a Project Management Institute study, 80% of high-performance organizations have a PMO (Project Management Office). Hear from one of EHR Concept’s lead project managers (PMs) and Consulting Partners, Deborah Aguilar, on how to best leverage a project Management Office (PMO) involved in your next technology implementation.
Why do PMOs exist?
Many organizations are suffering from an inability to deliver projects on time, under budget, and within scope. Unfortunately, strategic thinking is not enough; agility and adaptability are essential to sustainable future growth. One of the main misconceptions of the Project Manager role is the belief that anyone can step into that role. If someone took accounting in college, would they be considered qualified to do your taxes? Organizations know they need PMOs and PMs to lead their projects, but do Project Managers possess the skills to succeed? Promoting someone into this role, changing someone’s title, or adding more resources is not enough when you are trying to create a PMO positioned to succeed.
The primary function of the PMO is to manage shared resources across projects to drive increased efficiency and the implementation rate across the portfolio/program. A centralized PMO, combined with an extraordinarily strong supporting project management philosophy, can achieve a culture of accountability by delivering quality projects focused on continuous improvement.
The PMO identifies and develops project management methodologies, holding project managers accountable all the way through project audits, lessons learned, and the closing project cycle. The PMO develops policies and procedures, defines repeatable processes, and standardizes project status and project communications to ensure that all PMs are adhering to defined and repeatable PMO processes. Organizations should always know what they are getting when engaging a PM that reports directly to a PMO through additional visibility through detailed status reporting and increased communications.
A PMO is continually looking for conflicts in timing, resource inefficiencies, proper risk planning, and issue management, as well as managing stakeholder expectations to isolate potential problem areas and misaligned expectations well in advance. This ensures that they can be responsibly managed and addressed, maintaining time, scope, and budget and successfully achieving implementation for their customers. PMOs should be considered integral to positive organizational change regarding project dynamics.
How PMOs Play a Critical Role in Organization Agility
Most, if not all, organizations prioritize agility as a pillar in their governance and success models. With constant technology and market changes, the healthcare industry is always in flux. All healthcare organizations need a change champion capable of adapting in response to those changes to keep the organization moving at the pace required to drive projects forward and execute the strategic roadmap. With cross-functional visibility, PMOs are well-positioned to fill this role. Project Managers have a deep understanding of their projects, but the PMO has a deeper understanding of the organization.
The PMO is essential to facilitating mediation by bringing other competing projects, owners, and stakeholders together to work on resolutions based on what is best at the organizational level. To be successful, PMOs need to be included in the conversation and should be integral members of the strategic planning processes.
PMOs work to create relationships with Executives in the C-Suite to build trusted and valued relationships. Their partnership in developing and executing a strategic road map is the mechanism by which the PMO can deliver actionable insights to leadership, informing proactive recommendations to assist in positioning an organization to achieve higher levels of success.