The Evolution of the Enterprise PMO: What Comes Next?

August 18, 2022 | by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

This week, we’ve been updating one of our key white papers, Evolving the Established PMO, adding the most up-to-date statistics from our new research, The State of the PMO 2022. At the same time, I came across a research paper on the role of Artificial Intelligence in project management that had some interesting points to make about how AI will impact the PMO. These two streams ran together to create today’s blog.

In our State of the PMO research studies, we always ask respondents what challenges they are facing … and what they plan to do over the next two years to address them. Over time—and this year’s State of the PMO is the sixth in a series—clear patterns emerge.

Some of these are positive. For example, only a minority of PMOs today are seriously questioned by their organizations, whereas ten years ago this was very common. PMO processes are no longer seen as overhead by more than 80% of companies. Instead, the high value placed on a PMO’s work can be seen by the increasingly strategic roles with which they are tasked: portfolio selection and balancing, strategic planning and implementation, organizational risk management, the leadership of major organizational change initiatives (such as digital transformation). The former chasm between the PMO and the C-level has all but vanished, with about half of PMOs reporting directly to the C-level. The career path for project leaders now climbs into the highest echelon of the organization.

However, all is not roses. Or, I should say, there are some thorny problems! In at least two areas, even the best PMOs (those that have scored as Best in Class or as High Performers, according to which study you are consulting) continue to struggle.

Performance measurement and resource management are two areas that have shown up in every study we have ever conducted as being in the “needs work” column. Organizations know that these areas are troublesome, and they perennially list them among the top challenges they face. They also say, over and over …. for decades … that they plan to improve over the coming two years. So, PMO leaders know what their weaknesses are … and they intend to address them. So why do we see so little change?

Every PM needs an AI. Project managers, say one of the AI researchers in the paper mentioned above, work in “a swamp of data.” Very few of us are great at analyzing the amount of data generated by all the tools and systems we work with. Overload sets in. It’s hard to ascertain what is most important. We may not have chosen our measures with an eye to the KPIs that will flag important trends. But help is on the way! AI – operating as “an intelligent assistant” in PMI’s words—is more than capable of crunching our numbers for us, and analyzing them without becoming distracted. In fact, this kind of role for AI in project management is precisely what will make it possible for project leaders to have more time to focus on people, strategy, and business outcomes. Which is exactly where the profession needs to go.

One of the authors of the AI research paper notes that applying AI to repetitive, data-intensive processes, as well as to processes like resource management where humans can become distracted by personalities, emotions, and conflicting priorities, “The PMO … [will] mutate into an entity capable of managing organizational change, strategy and governance through increased innovation, agility, and stakeholder engagement.”

High-performing PMOs are already achieving a lot of these higher-order goals. But with “intelligent assistance,” they may finally be able to check performance measurement and resource management improvements off their to-do list.

We'll be discussing this and much more in our research webinar, coming up September 15.

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