How to Make Your PMO Tool Implementation Successful and Deliver Real Business Value

The APM Midlands Branch hosted a very interactive session on how to successfully implement your PMO tool, led by Rebecca Leadbitter and Steve Kirk from Sciforma.  The key emphasis is that the introduction of such a tool must be treated as a business change programme in its own right and therefore to ensure success it is key that the following principles are adhered to:

• Vision – this must be what you want and what you need to get from it
• Business case – if it isn’t solid then it won’t get the support from key stakeholders
• Strong sponsorship – don’t underestimate the power of having this driven from the top, tool will be in danger of collecting dust 6 months after it was implemented if it isn’t embraced by seniors
• Clearly defined requirements – use MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Wont have), you must be able to put the why next to the what
• Vanilla vs Engineered – Pareto Law applies, 80% is good enough, so take the ‘off the shelf’ product as much as possible, get it embedded before going for a phase 2 and a more engineered approach, clients often find the vanilla solution delivers most of the benefit
• SQEP – have suitably qualified and experience personnel running the programme and being part of the implementation team
• Culture – fix your processes and PM culture before implementation of the tool, the tool to a certain extent will only be as good as the culture environment it is going in to

Feedback from those attending included “It was good to see the process laid out and know that in our current PMO tool implementation we are trying to follow the best practise discussed tonight”.

The presentation can be viewed either below or on the APM Resources page.

Emma Carroll-Walsh
Branch Events Planner