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If you're setting up a PMO, or perhaps you're revitalizing an existing PMO in an attempt to get executive buy-in and support, one of your core decisions is what "services" you should offer. This is not a simple decision, but it is absolutely key to delivering the value that your business wants.
And delivering value is how you build a high-impact PMO.
So... what services should you offer?
Service Catalogue Template
There is no such thing as the definitive service catalogue template that works for everyone. Every organization, and therefore every PMO, is different. You can buy very long and detailed service catalogues like this one by Stuart Dixon (I know Stuart and his work is great). It contains over 250 "services" that a PMO might provide.
But nobody is suggesting you try to provide 250 services! No, no, no, no...!
To help narrow things down, we have pulled together our list of the most common services that we see into our own PMO Service Catalogue Template. Don't view this as a "to do list". Think of it more as a short-cut to brainstorming the list yourself. It's not meant to be definitive - think of it as the PMO Services Greatest Hits, the songs you really want to hear when you see them live on stage.
You can download a copy here... but make sure to read on to the end of this blog because the real magic is not in the template, but in the process of deciding which services matter the most.
3 Service Categories
Roughly speaking, you can break PMO services up into three categories. Different people and organizations use different terminology, but these three categories keep coming up again and again. The three categories are;
Portfolio management
Laura Barnard of PMO Strategies calls this Strategy Formulation. Future PMO / Wellingtone simply call it Strategy, but it's the set of services that allow you to capture demand, align your portfolio with business goals (prioritization), optimize your portfolio taking into account resources, create a clear portfolio roadmap (scheduling - avoid resource hot-spots) and more.
We like to call this "portfolio management" but whatever you call it, this is probably the most highly-leveraged area for an PMO to focus. It's possible to double the return on investment from your portfolio of projects by using the services in this category.
Fundamentally, Portfolio Management is all about setting your projects up to be successful. Investing in effective portfolio management means that you're working on the right projects, the ones that maximize value, that your people aren't overloaded and that you're delivering projects faster and with less risk. Result!
Project Delivery
This is where most PMOs spend their time - and we would argue that it's where they spend too much time. Whether you follow PMO Strategies and call this "Strategy Execution" or Future PMO and talk about "Delivery", what we all mean is "Services that help you actually execute the project".
This might include project reporting, administrative support, maintaining risk registers, doing compliance and assurance and more.
The goal here is to provide in-project services that help the project team delivery more efficiently. Complex projects and immature teams can often benefit from more support. Conversely, if your team of PMs has mastered the basics of project management, you might be able to ease back on these services.
Centre of Excellence
This is where you put in place all the supporting capabilities and infrastructure to support the other two pillars. This is home to PPM tools, knowledge management, PM training, exec sponsor training and more. It's where you develop / select methodologies - and boy, does this profession love methodologies!
The Future PMO team call this "Capability". Alexander David and the Value Matrix crew call it "Centre of Excellence". Whatever you call it, this is where you're putting in place all the "enabling capabilities" that help you build maturity and repeatability. It's about "embedding" good practice in the organization, if you like.
PMO Joe - Joe Pusz, inspirational founder of the PMO Squad - talks a lot about this stuff. He has even developed a whole capability model to assess how your organization has normalized and adopted project management. In this video, Joe talks about how to fuse strategy and execution and how to build that as a real capability in the business.
What services should my PMO provide?
To answer this, we have to start with the question, "Why do we have a PMO?" The answer to that question is surprisingly simple: we have a PMO to help maximize the return on investment from your project portfolio.
So the services you provide should be the ones that maximize the value that's delivered to the organization.
At TransparentChoice, we're big fans of Laura Barnard's approach to this question. In her book, IMPACT Engine, Laura talks about a structured process to assess which services you should focus on first. In summary, you
- Ask your leadership team what "pain points" they have
- For the top few, do root cause analysis of why the pain occurs (treat the root cause not the symptom)
- You'll likely find that there are a few key services that will address the root causes of most of your pain - deliver those first
- Work in 90-day sprints, ensuring that each sprint nails one of those pain points / root causes
You can read more on this approach in our Ultimate Guide to the PMO.
The benefit of this approach is that a) it's focused on solving the problems the business has, not on delivering some idealized list of services, b) it lets you prioritize and focus your efforts and c) it means you get to celebrate visible wins early.
This last point is really important as it's "celebrating the wins" that gets your leadership team to pay attention. The momentum this builds will give you the credibility and support to build the next service, and the next and so on...
The "project delivery" fallacy
Project delivery is where many PMOs feel most comfortable, but we'd argue that your time would be far better spent on Portfolio Management. This video from the Global Project Management Forum in Riyadh, 2024 explores this argument and explains why most PMOs should focus more on portfolio management "skills" than on "getting fitter" in Project Delivery.
Essentially, once you have the basics in place, you quickly get into the zone of diminishing returns. You can try harder and harder to execute projects well, to manage them better, but only make small incremental gains in performance.
The reason for this is that around 40% of the causes of project failure occur "outside of the project" itself. For example, if your delivery resources are overloaded, they will be multi-tasking. This pretty much guarantees that projects will be late and over budget. This overload is not something you can "project manage" your way out of. It's a portfolio management problem.
Yet many executives - and remember, your executives are not project management experts - will assume that "Project Management" is the key to success. They encourage the PMO to focus on the "Project Delivery" services, wrongly believing that "project management" is the reason projects are going wrong.
When you do the root cause analysis we talked about in the previous section, you'll likely find yourself in the Portfolio Management area... so that's where you should build services, services that can have a meaningful impact on your ability to deliver value from projects.
Review and adapt
This is important: the services you offer will, most likely, change over time.
Early on, for example, if you have a group of immature project managers, you might have to provide a lot of training, coaching and support services. You might have fairly rigid processes and templates to "keep them on the straight and narrow".
As your PMs mature, however, you can start to remove some of those templates and let the PMs use their judgement. This frees the PMO up to focus on the next service.
These tips will help you keep your services current;
- Interview your stakeholders. Ask what their biggest pain is and fix that.
- During those interviews, ask them which services you provide that don't add value... then kill those services
- Widely publicize the services you offer and ask for feedback
- Review the services you offer quarterly or, at worst, annually.
Conclusion
Having a long list of services can be useful inspiration. The key to building a high-impact PMO, however, is to focus on delivering the services that will boost the return your organization gets from its investment in projects.
Many PMOs fall foul of the Project Delivery Fallacy when they should be focusing on Portfolio Management. You can work this out by asking your leadership what "pain" they have and then doing root-cause analysis on that pain.
Focus on delivering one or two things at a time, and deliver services within 90 day sprints to create real momentum and remember to adjust your service catalogue to keep things current.
When you do all of this, you'll be delivering the services your organization needs to the right people at the right time and the result? Well, it all comes down to boosting that all-important return on investment from your portfolio of projects!
