Reflection on “Inside the PMO by Mustafa, August 2013”

This article discussed the PMO from an outsourcing perspective, where the author suggests that outsourcing PMO competencies in order to manage services can undoubtedly increase efficiency and reduce costs; however, that is conditioned by selecting the right vendor.

What happens in the outsourcing is that the organization typically pays a set fee for a vendor services that bears the cost for all other resources. Outsourcing PMO is not at all a new concept, and doing it right can be extremely rewarding. The firm also can outsource some of the PMO responsibilities and keep some; however, that decision is driven by cost, efficiency, and differs from one firm to another. As soon as the firm selects a vendor, the assistance of legal experts should be sought in order to protect the company’s interest in the contract.

Some of the lessons learned from this article is that it is crucial to keep in mind cost savings and improved efficiency when it comes to PMO outsourcing decisions. And to select the right vendor, it takes a full understanding to what the organization needs. Finally, every situation is unique by itself, so project managers should always treat this type of decisions with wisdom, and not only knowledge as the difference between those two is huge.

Personally, we had in 2014 an outsourcing of the PMO competencies; my company AIC was facing problems in meeting the deadlines of the design projects, so the company signed a contract with a development center in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The development center gave the employees several courses in team building, time management and strategic planning, but I considered that to be a waste of time; it was completely commercial, and they were not customer-focused. If I were the one to give that training, I would do the employees assessment by myself, rather than do what the top management thought the problem was. The development center started implementing solutions for undefined problems; it was focusing on the internal time wasters that presented 16% of the time issue that we were facing, and didn’t target any issues of the 84% of the problem, which was in the forecasting and planning activities.