9 Enterprise PMO Best Practices & Tips

As companies continue to grow, expand, and evolve, overseeing and aligning projects has become increasingly challenging. Most organizations today juggle multiple projects that each require strategic planning, resource management, capacity management, and accurate forecasting to ensure project success.

While individual projects may have leads or managers, the enterprise project management office (EPMO) is tasked with project portfolio management and ensuring strategic alignment. As more projects compete for resources and funding, EPMO has become even more important for efficient project management to achieve strategic objectives.

EPMO goes beyond portfolio management, however. By helping to eliminate organizational silos across the breadth of an organization, an enterprise project management office (PMO) helps keep companies focused on business strategy to ensure project teams meet business objectives.

Key Takeaways

• Clear governance with flexibility - Establish structured processes while maintaining agility to adapt to changing business needs

• Strong leadership with executive backing - Secure senior leadership support to enable decisive action across competing priorities

• Comprehensive resource visibility - Achieve optimization through real-time visibility into capacity, skills, and project demands

• Standardized processes and data visualization - Eliminate information silos with consistent processes and real-time dashboards

• Inclusive stakeholder engagement - Ensure buy-in and reduce resistance through diverse stakeholder participation

• Measurable business impact - Proper EPMO implementation delivers improved project success rates, resource utilization, and strategic alignment

Enterprise PMO Best Practices

Project, program, and portfolio management require a proactive approach. Here are some enterprise PMO best practices and tips to help you organize your EPMO and overcome some of the most common challenges.

Organizing Your EPMO

Whether you are creating your enterprise projects and portfolio management team from scratch, spinning it off from your business or IT department, or considering retooling roles and responsibilities, there are several things you need to consider.

1. Align your mission

It's not unusual for large organizations to have competing goals. This can create a misalignment among stakeholders, who may each have projects that they want to be completed. These projects may be competing for the same resources. Your EPMO must have firm guidance so that all stakeholders understand the purpose and mission.

Some 44% of projects attribute failure to a lack of alignment between business and project objectives. When you can demonstrate that you are holding projects and team members accountable to your goals, it can help to manage projects more smoothly and reduce frustration for stakeholders.

2. Provide strong leadership

Having the right leadership in place is crucial in every area of an organization, but in the enterprise PMO, it can be the difference between success and chaos. The right EPMO leader must have strong communication skills to work with other organizational leaders, so they put the needs of the organization first above all else.

3. Be inclusive

Effective portfolio management requires diverse communication across internal and external stakeholders, suppliers, vendors, and contractors. Success requires coordination across other enterprise functions, such as finance, procurement, HR, and shared services. Everyone has a stake in organizational success, and diverse viewpoints can help create better outcomes.

4. Practice agility

A driving force behind the need for an EPMO is the dynamically changing environment that is pervasive in today's business climate. Things can change quickly and often do. However, even within an agile environment, you still need structure and guardrails so you can pivot when needed while maintaining strategic alignment.

Agility often requires making decisions quickly, which is challenging to do without having all the information you need at hand. When you have a centralized way to break down the walls that separate projects, you have a broader view to facilitate better resource allocation, capacity planning, and better decision-making. That's precisely what you need to make smart decisions quickly.

You also need visibility and transparency to get buy-in when you do make decisions, especially when they impact multiple projects or stakeholders.

5. Have authority and backing

EPMOs must have the authority to make difficult decisions. As such, they need to report to senior company leadership. While senior leadership retains the authority to overrule recommendations from the EPMO, the enterprise project management office must have the authority down the line of reporting to make decisions.

Some decisions will be unfavorable across parts of an organization, so EPMOS must have the backing and full support of top leadership. Without backing from the top, it can cause internal stress for an organization, especially when you consider that 46% of companies report that team members do not understand the importance of project management.

Overcoming Challenges in Enterprise PMO

We also have a few specific enterprise PMO tips for dealing with some of the most common challenges we hear from many of the companies we work with. We're providing a brief overview and some suggestions about how to overcome these challenges, but we have also developed a series of webinars if you would like to review these topics more in-depth. We've provided a link to the recordings for on-demand viewing in each area below.

1. Approaching resource and financial management

Many organizations struggle to understand the available resources and to align resources, capacity, and projects confidently. Without the right tools, it can be challenging to manage every aspect of projects, especially when multiple projects have been funded.

You need a way to manage and monitor all of your resources in real-time and a way to run various scenarios so you can anticipate potential problems and develop solutions quickly.

2. Create better project management data visualization

If you spend hours creating reports or finding the information you need, you need to retool your processes and project management platform. The same goes if you spend hours each month compiling reports. The proper process and platform can provide real-time data and visualizations that make it easy for you to track deliverables against the objectives.

Robust data visualizations and real-time dashboards provide an easy way to show others what's going on, to save you time having to translate data for other stakeholders.

3. Manage consistency by standardizing control and governance

Efficient project management requires consistency across every level. If your organization struggles with standardization at the EPMO level, your project managers will struggle as well. Conversely, if your project managers fail to provide the information you need to monitor progress and move projects forward, things can get messy.

4. Formalize cost improvement programs

Cost control is an essential function of project management. When proven project management strategies are employed, companies waste 21% less money, according to the Project Management Institute. When you consider that nearly 10% of every dollar is wasted due to poor project performance, even a slight improvement in cost management can yield significant savings.

To realize significant cost savings, you must centralize the management of programs and analyze data across programs.

Advanced Enterprise PMO Strategies and Information Management

Building on these foundational practices, successful organizations implement advanced strategies that transform their program management office into a strategic enabler. A well-functioning portfolio management office serves as the central hub for critical information flow, ensuring that decision-makers have access to accurate, timely data across all initiatives.

The roles and responsibilities within an EPMO must be clearly defined to avoid confusion and ensure accountability. A skilled PMO manager serves as the bridge between executive leadership and project teams, translating strategic objectives into actionable plans. This manager works closely with individual project managers to ensure alignment while maintaining oversight of the broader portfolio.

The project office structure should support both centralized governance and distributed execution. This hybrid approach enables consistent standards while allowing flexibility at the project level. The PMO team must include diverse skill sets, ranging from analytical capabilities to stakeholder management expertise, creating a well-rounded unit capable of addressing complex organizational challenges.

Understanding PMO roles within the broader organizational context is crucial for success. A controlling PMO model may be appropriate for highly regulated industries, while other organizations might benefit from a more supportive approach. The key is to align the PMO's operating model with the organizational culture and strategic objectives.

Integrating Program Management Excellence

Effective program management extends beyond individual project coordination to encompass strategic portfolio alignment and value realization. The PMI framework provides valuable guidance for establishing robust governance structures that support long-term organizational success. A PGMO (Program Group Management Office) can serve as an intermediate layer between the enterprise PMO and individual project teams, managing related initiatives that collectively deliver strategic outcomes.

Multiple PMOs may exist within large organizations, each serving different business units or functional areas. The enterprise PMO serves as the coordinating body, ensuring alignment and preventing duplication of effort. This distributed model allows for specialization while maintaining overall coherence in project and program delivery.

The manager responsible for enterprise PMO operations must possess strong analytical skills, excellent communication abilities, and a deep understanding of organizational dynamics. This role requires balancing competing priorities while maintaining focus on strategic objectives and ensuring that all initiatives contribute to overall business success.

Effective Enterprise PMO Best Practices

When you consider that organizations typically waste 12% of their resources due to ineffective project management, you can see how quickly improving basic planning and execution can make a big difference.

Use these enterprise PMO best practices and tips to improve your organization.