- For you to be able to govern your project well, your organization needs to have a permanent infrastructure in place to support the management of projects, programs, or portfolios. This infrastructure is formerly known as the project program or portfolio management office or PMO. In this video, we'll talk about three ways a PMO usually supports a manager, the role of the PMO and benefits of a PMO. The first type of PMO is the embedded PMO. This is great for larger projects where the investment is justified and you need lots of support. With this kind of PMO, the project program or portfolio manager, manages and delivers most of the PMO functions. Apart from those processes that the organization itself defines and applies. The central PMO is better for a portfolio of small projects where you're prioritizing flexibility over management control. The majority of PMO functions sit outside of the project teams and the PMO provides support services to multiple projects. Last up hub and spoke. The hub and spoke PMO is great for organizations who need to support many types and sizes of projects or programs. A central hub PMO provides enterprise or portfolio wide support services with embedded satellite or spoke PMOs to support individual programs, projects. Okay, so that's three sorts of PMOs, different organizations are likely to have. Now let's talk a little about the actual role of the PMO. Well, as we've just talked about, there are different sorts of PMOs depending on the organization. So the role of one can also change from organization to organization. But a unifying theme is that the PMO tends to provide services to all projects that wouldn't be justifiable in just a single project. For instance, acting as a center of excellence for the organization, providing best practice standards and training, carrying out assurance audits, supporting the control and reporting projects by collecting, analyzing, and presenting progress information, providing access to vital documentation and specialist skills and helping projects with general administrative services. In short then the PMO sits above any one project, but supports all projects, keeping them in line with the business's ethos and expectations for successful projects. Because the PMO has the oversight to do all of this it brings quite a few terminable benefits to the organization. Of course, the benefits of PMO can bring more change depending on what type of PMO it is and the sort of organization it exists in. But here are five benefits that you should generally expect. First up repeatable success. This one might seem a little obvious, but by having a central body that looks after all projects in an organization, over time the chances of success for individual projects becomes higher. Because of consistent documentation, planning approaches, and ways of working. PMOs also help improve decision making too. By standardizing the reporting approaches. This helps continuous improvement for ongoing and new projects. The PMO will help project managers become more effective and confident by mentoring and coaching managers and project staff. Given that the PMO exists to support any ongoing project, it can also help the organization to understand what the status of projects is in terms of the strategic alignment with any portfolio. Last up the PMO can help to manage lessons learned by gathering, storing, and sharing lessons across projects that otherwise it might never come into contact. And that's it for this video. The PMO is an incredibly important and effective part of any organization, supporting all ongoing projects and bringing quite a few benefits to the organization overall.