How can the PMO report project statuses to the company’s management more effectively?

In my previous job, I held the position of Strategy Director at a large Polish company. During that time, a Project Management Office (PMO) was established in the area I managed. The company placed great importance on having a solid business strategy and made significant efforts to implement it effectively. It is widely known that when a company develops a set of strategic goals, projects are then identified for each goal to help achieve them. As the number of projects in the company where I worked grew, this led to the creation of the PMO. The company’s management decided to dedicate one day each month to review how strategic projects were being implemented – as a result, a full-day event called the Strategic Project’s Review appeared in the calendar of every management team member every month. In the article, I will explain how this initiative impacted the efficiency of project execution and the challenges we faced during its implementation – I encourage you to read on to learn more about the details of this process.

The context of establishing and challenges of the Project Management Office

The company’s management decided to dedicate one full day each month to reviewing the implementation of strategic projects. As a result, every management team member had a full-day event called the Strategic Project’s Review scheduled in their calendar every month.

The management required the PMO Director to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for each monthly project review, where the status of each project was described on two slides, following a standardized format developed in advance. And here is where the first challenges for the PMO Director began. To create this PowerPoint presentation for the management, the PMO Director attempted to meet with each project manager beforehand to discuss the project’s status and then update the two status slides accordingly. A significant problem was scheduling these meetings. Often, project managers could not find the time to meet, and even when a meeting was scheduled, it was frequently rescheduled multiple times because “something else took priority.” As a result, there were situations where, during the Strategic Project’s Review, the management expressed dissatisfaction with the PMO’s work—despite the PMO putting in significant effort to prepare everything before the meeting. I believe similar situations may occur in many organizations.

A solution: The functionality of automated project reviews

When we decided to develop the FlexiProject project management software, our strategic goal was to create a tool that would significantly facilitate the PMO’s work in reporting the company’s project status—specifically, project statuses for the management team. To achieve this, we introduced the functionality of automated project reviews.

Before describing in detail how automated project reviews work, I want to emphasize that they have proven highly effective in practice. Some large companies that have been using FlexiProject for a while (both in production industries and financial institutions) have integrated automated project reviews into their project status reporting mechanisms for management. This means that when a project manager or PMO reports a project’s status to the project sponsor, the steering committee, or the company’s management, they are required to do so using FlexiProject’s automated reviews.

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How does project status reporting to management work in practice?

In the FlexiProject system, when creating a new project review, the PMO enters the review name, the date it is to take place, and selects the projects to be reviewed. At this point, each project manager receives an email notification from the system informing them that their project will be reviewed by the board, sponsor, or steering committee on the specified day. Before the review date, the project manager must update all the data in the system and complete the so-called One Pager, which is equivalent to two slides in .ppt as described earlier in the article. However, in the FlexiProject system, this process is much easier, as many elements in the One Pager form are automatically populated, and the project manager’s role is only to comment on the situation of their project appropriately. Once the project manager has completed their One Pager, they click the “ready for review” button, and at that moment, the PMO sees this information. The following illustration shows a sample One Pager:

When project managers complete their One Pagers and notify readiness for review, the PMO can immediately see on their dashboard which projects are ready for review. As shown in the illustration below, wherever there is a small green marker on the left side, it means that the project manager has informed about the readiness for review.

When all project managers report their readiness for review, both the PMO and the board can display all project statuses along with the project managers’ comments on a single page.

Project managers’ comments are reported directly to the board and other stakeholders. If there are too many projects on this dashboard and it’s difficult to navigate the list, for example, the CEO can filter only those projects that have an average or poor condition and focus on problematic projects where a response and decision from a board member are needed.

What is useful in organizations is the ability to review historical One Pagers and, for instance, see what the project manager said about their project three or six months ago.

Automated Project Reviews significantly improve the comfort and effectiveness of the PMO’s work, as well as clearly provide the board with information about the company’s project situation.