Key Insights: PMOs in 2024

Project Management Offices (PMOs) continue to evolve in 2024, playing a crucial role in ensuring project success and organizational growth. However, PMOs face various challenges that impact their effectiveness and purpose. Let's delve into key statistics from the 2024 PMO Research Report and explore strategies for optimizing PMO performance.

Understanding PMO Value

A staggering 93% of unsupported PMOs highlight executives lack the understanding of the value of a PMO. This statistic underscores the importance of executive support for PMO success and longevity. Working closely with your executives to define the purpose of your PMO is crucial to ensuring you gain that executive support long-term.

Utilization of External Resources

The industry report reveals that 77% of PMOs rely on temporary project management resources, reflecting a trend towards flexible staffing models. Organizations are embracing the PMO as a Service model as part of the “as a Service” movement like payroll, software, data and more. The talent to run a project does not require expertise in your domain. That is why you have SMEs. Partnering with an organization that offers expertise in project delivery is important. Not only does a partnership like this provide additional agility and adaptability for the organization, but it ensure you’re continuing to focus on the things that matter – delivering projects better. 

Success Metrics

Despite challenges, 61% of project practitioners cite their PMO as successful. So, what’s the answer to improving PMO success rate? With 23% citing there is no formal definition of success, that’s probably a good place to start, but it needs to align with what the organization is looking to achieve. Ensure you have a proper way to measuring that success within your organization to continue to evaluate if you’re on track.

Remote Work Dynamics

In a post-pandemic world, 73% of PMOs say that remote PMO resources can perform as effectively as on-site resources. Embracing remote work offers opportunities for talent acquisition, cost savings, and global collaboration. This also increases the talent pool for organizations as they are now not just focused on hiring a prospective employee within commuting distance to the office. This means better talent for delivering projects. 

Value Assessment Processes

Surprisingly, 70% of PMOs lack a formal process for assessing value, highlighting a gap in performance evaluation and continuous improvement. Implementing structured value assessment frameworks, KPI tracking, stakeholder feedback mechanisms, and benchmarking against industry standards are essential for demonstrating PMO contributions and refining strategies over time. However, this is only attainable if you have organization acceptance for what that PMO value is and should be. This happens at Stage 3 of the Organizational Project Delivery Journey.

PPM Tool Utilization

Let’s not forget about the toolsets that are required to ensure project delivery is successful. While organizations invest in Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools, only 50% of their features are actively utilized. This statistic emphasizes the importance of aligning tool functionalities with organizational needs, providing comprehensive training, and fostering a culture of tool adoption and utilization across project teams and stakeholders. A PPM tool should be an enterprise-wide tool if project delivery is even going to be to fully optimized, strategized and generating value for the business.

Conclusion

In conclusion, PMOs in 2024 face challenges such as executive understanding, resource utilization, value assessment, and tool utilization. However, by understanding where the weaknesses of your PMO are and creating that roadmap to better project delivery, you’ll put yourself in a better position to deliver projects better in your organization and become a business function your organizations can’t live without.