Key Areas to Focus on When Moving into PMO Roles

Last week we held a PMO Career and Development drop-in session to allow PMO Professionals or those moving into the roles, the opportunity to ask Lindsay and Eileen any career or training questions.

We know the PMO career path can be varied, offering several progression routes depending on your interests and expertise, so we thought this webinar would be great for anyone ranging from PMO Managers or just starting your journey such as Project Support Officers or PMO Administrators, to provide you with the insights, tools, and training you need to succeed in a PMO role.

We had a lot of great questions submitted before and during the webinar. One of the main questions we received was ‘I’m looking to move into PMO roles, is there any key areas I should be learning that I would not necessarily get in Project Management.’

Click below to see the answers and advice from Lindsay and Eileen.

Keep an eye out on our YouTube channel and LinkedIn Group for further PMO career questions.

If you are looking to move into a PMO role we have a variety of resources available. We have PMO certification courses which focus on PMO roles such as the Essentials suite, or specialist courses which focus on specific PMO areas such as Benefits Management.

We have held Lunch and Learn webinars focusing on ‘Getting started in a PMO role’, ‘Your First Steps as a PMO Administrator’, and many more which are all available to view here.

As well as training we also focus on an individual’s development and offer PMO coaching and a short CV development course.

If you would like to discuss your PMO career and development with us in more detail, get in touch with our training specialist here and we will be happy to discuss our expertise and advice.

Transcript:

“I’m looking to move into PMO roles is there any key areas that I should be learning that would not necessarily get in project management?” which I thought was a brilliant question I’ve never had that question before how would you respond what’s your first thoughts?

So, I think if you’ve already got training in project management that’s really a good start off because you understand what’s involved in project management and it’s interesting in terms of what kind of role you’re going to go into in a PMO because if you’re going into a project office then actually, you know all about the project management so you know how to support the project manager in doing those various aspects.

Interestingly if you want to move into a program office is a little bit more information in terms of how projects fit into that overall program.

I think what often happens is if you’ve done some project management you roll into the centre of excellence element which is where we’re setting up the processes and procedures on how we do things for other people in the organisation or for the project delivery team in the organisation.

There needs to be an understanding about this whole concept of services in terms of kind of what are we going to provide and change management in terms of how are people going to feel when you change the processes and how they’ve got to work so they’re kind of two key things

I think both of us always go back to behaviours about recognising the key behaviours that are required so we’ve got those listed in our PMO Competency Framework, we talk about what some of those kinds of key behaviours are to actually kind of work in a PMO area.

I mean I think when I look at this question and I think about back to my early days of wanting to get into PMO and making the assumption that this is somebody that’s quite new to the space completely there’s a lot of underlying business skills I suppose in terms of how you deal with people.

I certainly remember some of the early day training that I had was that simple things about you know how to do business-based writing, yes you know how to talk to people but at a more senior level than you.

I was really lucky in the place that I was working that they did a lot of that kind and that kind of thing so it’s I think it’s when you realise just how many areas when you’re in a PMO role that you’re touching in terms of into you know wider reaches of the organisation it is that kind of communication stuff both verbally and written that I think gets missed sometimes.

I think also with you know with moving into PMO roles I mean and I have said there is project management, there’s program management, there’s portfolio management and then if you look at some of the stuff that comes out of them okay fair enough if this is not for early days when you’re walking into a PMO role but when you look at some of the courses around things like the House of PMO Essentials, it shows you because the core text there is a one of its PMO competency framework and it shows you just how many different areas that PMO fits and as you mentioned change management, there’s obviously leadership and management stuff there’s things like business analysis there’s quite a lot of data-related things so data analysis and certainly now you know in the whole AI space.

I think it’s just amazing how many disciplines one of a better word that it can touch, and you can specialise, so if you’re you know if you’ve done a bit of project management but you like planning or you really like Risk, there’s an opportunity to go into it in much more detail.

I think for me building on what Lindsay said it’s being able to communicate it. I had a call yesterday with somebody who’s done some great work on metrics but actually, you know looking at it, it looks fantastic but what is required is how to further present that in a way that makes sense to lots of other people so they can kind of communicate their work and a lot of the role with what we do in a PMO is being able to kind of communicate with people in an appropriate manner.

So again, just know that that would be my obvious one for the people starting but I also think it’s a great question just generally if you’ve been in the area for a while as well because actually you could change that question which is ‘what are some of the other key areas are that I could be thinking about in terms of my professional development and securing I suppose my career in PMO for the future’ which is where I think a lot of the kind of data analysis type stuff is really going to be a big thing.

But we all know that data analysis is great but unless you put that communication and storytelling around it so you can actually kind of share that with other people it becomes very difficult.

I think the other thing is as well where you kind of from a PMO perspective is the coaching and mentoring because a lot of the times you’re working perhaps with project managers and programme managers who may well be very senior to you but

actually you’ve got to coach and mentor them in terms of how to kind of follow the process that the organisation’s got or fill in a particular template or get information and so it’s really kind of a coaching approach you might need to take in the communication.

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