This is the third installment in our series revisiting some of the key messages from our recent webinar on “How Agile PMOs can support Financial Planning“. Read the first article on the Role of the PMO: Help bridge the Agile expectations gap here, and the second on The State of Enterprise Agile here.
With the mainstreaming of Agile, Project and Portfolio Management Offices have had to learn to adapt. The critical roles & functions of the PMO are changing from one focused on delivering projects (if possible, on-time and on-budget) to facilitating the overall planning process of the entire product portfolio. From being a Project Management Office, the PMO is increasingly become a Portfolio Management Office.
But to be able to perform these roles, the PMO itself must change. As Margo Visitacion, Vice president and principal analyst with Forrester, one of the leading analyst IT advisory first, explains in this clip.
As we can see, the introduction of new roles into the traditional PMO is needed to help facilitate planning activities, from architecture experts, to business owners for strategic direction, to finance for funding.
This group of strategic directors are now providing the planning process, for execution and feedback by the rest of the delivery team. This results in the evolved PMO also being an essential support to the organization in terms of resource management dependencies, as it has visibility of the portfolio (and its restraints) in its entirety.