PMO Roles & Responsibilities

Project managers’ experience varies depending on the industry, company, and project management method used. One company has a whole department called the Project Management Office (PMO), which is responsible for standardizing and organizing the best project management techniques.
Continue reading: Project Management Office (PMO), Meaning
What is a typical day in a PMO?
A PMO is a highly structured organization that has many levels of meetings and processes. It is easy to describe a typical week by listing all the tasks that must be done. Project managers who are key members of a PMO can expect to see a small amount of each of these things every day.
Meetings are used to plan, manage, review, and report on project details. Meetings include time with key team members and managers to review progress, blockers, weekly project check-ins, cross functional team reviews with presentations, and meetings with scrum teams and technical teams to discuss progress and receive updates on development.
Collaboration with leaders on scope alignment, resource allocation and obtaining approvals to request project changes and make launch go/no-go decisions.
Through presentations, spreadsheets and project planning software dashboards such as Smartsheet, leadership and team leaders can report on project status weekly or monthly.
Create presentations for project kickoff meetings.
Administrative tasks include filling out timesheets, updating project plans, transferring and managing project file files, checking-ins with vendors and scheduling meetings. This includes being a detective to find the right people and information to answer your questions or give you direction.
Working in a PMO vs Traditional Project Management
Traditional Project Management
Depending on the size of your company, industry and how many project managers you have, traditional project management environments can differ.
Traditional methods may not have a clear method of measuring progress or project success. Depending on your budget, you can use different tools. Budgets and timelines for projects can be changed at any time. Everything is planned out in detail upfront. The work can then begin quickly and be done with minimal disruption.
Traditional project management is a project manager who is responsible for the success of the project. Although teams may be involved, the PM is responsible for creating the plan and overseeing the project’s completion.
PMs have unlimited tools at their disposal, provided they are approved by management. A simple spreadsheet can also be used to manage large projects. In waterfall, it is common to have loose and high-level milestone-driven timelines. Resource allocation is often left to the leadership based on profit or loss.
Continue reading: Project Office vs PMO – Definition & Purpose
Project Management Office
A PMO environment is a tightly structured and well-planned organization that follows pre-determined plans and processes.
The PMO process is repeatable and optimized. The governance framework is first established, making it easy to delegate tasks and approvers quickly, efficiently, and without question. KPIs are used for determining project success or failure. There is low risk of project failures, missed deadlines and budget slips. It is easy to identify knowledge gaps early and take proactive steps to close them.
Project success in a PMO is achieved through collaboration between the project manager, the project governance, and the sponsor. Governance structure identifies the project leadership and the steering committee, as well as the sponsor, functional owner and technology owner. Stakeholders, workstream leaders, and those who provide input, implementation, or approvals are also identified