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Antipatterns to Implement a PMO
By Jose Barato
September 30, 2023
6 minutes read
The Project Management Office (PMO) must focus on delivering outcomes —otherwise, it risks being perceived merely as a cost center. Organizations often recognize the need for a PMO when the volume of ongoing projects becomes overwhelming. Managers find they lack the time to ensure projects are completed on time, within budget aligned with business objectives, and delivering tangible value.
As projects grow increasingly complex, the PMO often lacks the capacity to manage all of them effectively—sometimes overseeing more than 500 projects in execution simultaneously.
The PMO’s role is to govern projects, not to manage them directly. It should empower project professionals to take ownership of individual projects. These professionals must be accountable for project success, able to anticipate risks, and ready to propose and implement corrective actions before issues escalate.
A project professional is not just someone who reports status, assigns tasks, or tracks progress. They must dedicate themselves to professionally managing the project. This includes, among other responsibilities:
- Controlling the project’s schedule, budget, funding, and scope.
- Guiding the team toward value-driven delivery and alignment with business goals.
- Managing Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies (RAID).
- Conducting regular project status reviews, evaluating progress, identifying improvement areas, and recommending corrective actions.
- Measuring variances and providing accurate forecasts.
- Monitoring team members’ timesheets and expenses.
- Assigning tasks to team members (in predictive project environments).
- Managing deliverables and handling changes effectively.
- Overseeing requirements and managing stakeholder expectations.
- Ensuring compliance with contract terms and conditions.
To address the technical challenge of governing 50 to 500 concurrent projects, many organizations unintentionally adopt antipatterns—counterproductive strategies that ultimately undermine their goals. Instead of improving organizational project management maturity, these missteps often lead to implementation failures. As a result, executives begin to view the PMO as a cost center that adds little value, engagement declines, and opportunities for skilled project professionals diminish.
«Antipatterns emerge when the PMO is not designed by a Project Professional.»
Many organizations ultimately suffer the negative consequences of establishing a PMO based on one or more common implementation antipatterns.
The IT Specialist
The “IT Specialist” Antipattern involves assigning responsibility for managing 50 to 500 concurrent projects to a single IT specialist:
- Projects are treated merely as a collection of tasks, and the technical solution centers around task-tracking tools. This approach results in a project management information system focused on digitizing tasks, documents, and forms—often using tools like Microsoft Planner, Project for The Web, Jira, Notion, Coda, Monday, ClickUp, Smartsheet or Asana.
- After a refinement phase—primarily driven by technical input from project teams—the new project management system is made mandatory, while alternative tools are banned. In practice, efforts become reactive, focused on fixing problems as they arise. The primary method of project management shifts to frequent meetings, whether face-to-face or remote, which are often exhausting for participants. Team members lack contextual visibility and, as the saying goes, “can’t see the forest for the trees.” Projects are neither prioritized nor organized into business units, portfolios, or programs, further hindering strategic alignment and efficiency.
- But what happens when team members don’t consistently enter data into the mandated tools? Who becomes the point of contact when someone needs to know a project’s expected completion date? And when a project fails, runs late, or goes over budget—who is ultimately held accountable?
The Consultant
The “Consulting” Antipattern involves assigning the responsibility of designing the PMO to an external project management consultant:
- Significant effort will be invested in analyzing the current situation, forecasting future scenarios, identifying gaps, and developing a strategic action plan. Managers will realize that, to effectively manage projects, they must first revise existing procedures. Activities labeled as “operations” will be removed from scope. A project typology will be developed based on the different phases of the project life cycle. Visible results of this effort will include document templates and comprehensive training plans for managing projects, programs, and portfolios.
- To manage the increasing number of complex projects, implementing PPM (Project Portfolio Management) tools becomes essential. However, this often comes with significant licensing costs, integration challenges with corporate information systems, and the need to maintain a dedicated team of consultants. These consultants frequently spend most of their time managing the tool and preparing reports, rather than adding strategic value to project execution.
- What happens when management decides it’s not the right time to implement these strategic changes? Who will waste valuable time writing documents that ultimately go unread?
The Process Expert
The “Business Process Redesign” Antipattern involves assigning a process expert the task of treating projects as if they were operations, attempting to industrialize them like assembly lines in a factory:
- Different types of projects will be modeled as standardized processes, with defined workflows, approval procedures, automated steps, and key metrics. Bottlenecks will be identified, and improvement goals will be set. However, it will take several months of definition and training before any project can be managed according to the new processes.
- Unfortunately, projects are neither repetitive nor stable. They are meant to transform ideas into reality. Projects are not operational tasks on an assembly line; they are, instead, knowledge work. The people involved in projects should not feel like mere cogs in a machine. To achieve success, it’s crucial to provide them with visibility, context, and, above all, a voice in the process.
- What happens when people realize they can bypass certain process steps to achieve better, faster, and more valuable results for the business?
The Data Scientist
The “Data Science” Antipattern occurs when a data scientist attempts to solve the problem of managing 50 to 500 projects by automating numerical reports:
- The data scientist will identify data sources, design extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes, create data marts, and develop graphical visualizations of historical data, project status, trends, indicators, KPIs, and more. The result is often a project management information system based on Excel and PowerPoint reports, with varying degrees of automation. Some PMOs may use tools like PowerBI or Tableau for this purpose.
- Managers will be presented with a series of dashboards that create a deceptive sense of control. At best, if the fact tables accurately reflect the state of the projects, they will only provide retrospective measurements of what has already occurred—issues that are beyond remedy.
- Will insights from dashboards arrive in time to improve the performance of projects already flagged as red? And what happens when traffic light indicators are green—yet every stakeholder knows the projects are off track?