Many organisations struggle to successful integrate a PMO when they fail to customise the PMO to the culture of their organisation. Ignoring the organisations culture and work practices, they enforce a cookie cutter standard PMO. The PMO can end up being viewed as part auditor and part methodology police, as something which wastes people’s time collecting unnecessary information. This results in a lack of adoption of the PMO practices and its structures fail, leading to “shadow” projects which avoid using the PMO.

This presentation outlines the change management approach taken by UCC’s IT Services to design a realistic and adaptable PMO which understands and works within the culture of the organisation. It focused on identifying how to support the key business drivers required while resolving the main pain points which continually reoccurred. Its ethos is “progress not perfection” and it focuses on sustainable incremental improvement. Using this approach has resulted in a PMO which:

• Provided a value proposition for all stakeholders
• Established organisational governance and oversite
• Raised the profile of IT projects within the university
• Implemented new processes to approve and prioritise projects
• Implemented an adaptable project management methodology which can flex depending on project criteria, type and size
• Simplified the reporting requirements for PMs
• Created a visual PMO dashboard
• Enabled strategic decision making with metrics and data
• Moved from project management to portfolio management