Last week I took part in a new venture called PMTV which is run by Bernardo Tirado and Jon Hyde . It was actually run using Google+ functionality Hang Outs which makes it easy to broadcast conversation live and then make them available afterwards via You Tube. The theme for the show was – Why Do PMOs Fail and you can see the whole episode below. At the beginning of the show it was useful to define what a PMO is – and the definitions I gave came from the work of the APM PMO SIG where the committee put its collective head together a while back when working on the new Body of Knowledge guide from the APM. Here are the definitions I gave: Project Office Supports and assists the Project Manager and Project Sponsor in their duties in directing and managing a project. Types of functions: Monitoring and controlling – maintaining plans, collecting and analysing data etc Governance – project audits, healthchecks etc Administrative – planning support, risk, issue reports, quality reviews etc Will depend on maturity of the org, frameworks used, competencies of the staff etc Physically or virtually located, can be permanent or temporary (disbanded once project delivered) For example – a project at a customer site – the project office of 3 people would support the project manager and project team actually on-site. The three people in the Project Office would support different aspects of the project

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PMO – Quick Definitions