5 Steps for Starting a Project Management Office (PMO)
March 18th, 2025
Project Management is not for the faint of heart! When your company undertakes difficult projects, your chance of success can plummet if you have a lack of defined processes aligned to your company’s strategic goals.
Signs your company might need a PMO:
Is there a lack of transparency and confusion of what is happening on projects?
Is there a lack of clarity of sponsor ownership or role clarity for those involved in the projects you are undertaking?
Is there clear prioritization or is everything a priority?
Are your resources overwhelmed and can’t do anything well? Are they just playing whack-a-mole with whatever screams the loudest?
Are projects not getting completed on time or hitting roadblocks that hold up projects and keep them from moving?
If you think you might need a PMO, here are my top critical steps!
1: Understand and document the current state of project management at your organization. Be honest! You can’t improve if you don’t know where you are starting from. Talk to others in the organization and get different viewpoints of the current state. When I set up a PMO for a B2B SaaS company, this step was critical in gathering feedback of how project management was currently viewed and impacts they were seeing in the organization.
2: Clearly define the goals and strategy of your PMO with alignment to your company goals. It is very important to have executive support for this, preferably with a specific sponsor. If you don’t do this step, it’s easy to be misaligned with leadership or other stakeholders with different ideas of what the PMO will do.
3: Prioritize the current project backlog. If you aren’t already prioritizing, leadership could be concerned that fewer projects will be completed. I’ve experienced this myself in one of the PMO’s I set up. This will take time to gain trust that the velocity for projects will increase because you will commit to projects based on your resources available.
4: Define what tools, processes (including a project intake process), and templates are needed for your PMO. This can start small and change as you grow and learn.
5: Communicate and report on the progress of the PMO. If others don’t know what you are doing in the PMO, they won’t know how to engage and this will impact your effectiveness. It’s important to make this a two-way conversation so that you can learn about your blind spots and continuously improve.
A good PMO can help the entire business be successful by enabling the success of strategic projects and key initiatives. Please reach out if you have any questions or if you might need help with your PMO at snowdogsolutions@gmail.com!
