Are you finding it challenging to find and retain the talent you know you need to succeed in delivering valuable project management office (PMO) services? Do you wish you had the budget to acquire the talent you need to accomplish your strategy? What should you take into consideration with PMO department staffing? Discover four critical elements when hiring project management office teams.
People are the vibrant heartbeat of a PMO and bring life to the services the PMO offers. A PMO’s value may not be readily established or visible without the right people. Four staffing considerations can help you build a stellar PMO team.
1. PMO Department Skills and Competencies
Go beyond determining how well skills and competencies deliver the job requirements and qualifications. Get to know your team members through the interview process or when you first inherit a team. Understand what they like and do not like to do, what they excel at, and what excites them about their career. Leverage that information as much as possible when assessing their fit. Match their passion and interests to their role. Focus on maximizing strengths instead of converting weaknesses into strengths.
Each team member’s skills, competencies, and experience should align with the services offered by your PMO. Suppose your PMO offers mentoring or functions as the source of the organization’s project managers. In that case, they must have extensive and recent project management experience and be willing to unbiasedly share their knowledge of solution delivery and outcome management. PMOs offering primarily administrative services require people who love attention to detail and have an analytical bent, usually in the context of excellent writing skills for executive-level documents. Project management tool support requires a heavy focus on infrastructure, software, and other technical knowledge and problem-solving skills, combined with a person who enjoys daily variety.
2. PMO Department Capacity
Expect to create demand for the PMO’s services. Plan your service launches in alignment with the resources you have available. Plan how you will avoid saying “no” to requests for services due to shortcomings in available staff. Timing is everything since it is sometimes difficult to predict when the fruits of your marketing efforts and actual results will have a positive impact on demand for your services.
Staffing PMO services that require experienced project managers can be incredibly challenging when your budget is constrained, and outsourced staff is not perceived as credible. Quite often, the staffing source for this type of service is from your customer base. Consider enticing those customers with rotations and providing a clear career path.
3. PMO Department Ratio
Identify customers of the PMO and align the number of resources in the PMO with that customer base to avoid diminished service delivery quality and long customer wait times. Knowing your customer base can be hampered in organizations where job titles do not necessarily indicate the PMO customer’s role. Identifying PMO customers can be as simple as asking or encouraging self-nomination. Maintain your customer list in alignment with resource changes and as the visibility of PMO increases.
PMO sponsors and senior management who are already familiar with the PMO’s services and value are more likely to support requests for additional resources when it is clear how those resources align with service offerings and address pent-up demand. Plan for open, frequent dialogue with all stakeholders.
4. Your PMO Department’s Credibility
Avoid experimenting with the PMO’s success by ensuring your staff is perceived to be credible in the context of your PMO’s goals, values, and service offerings. Where can you find credible and competent staff? The “not invented here” mindset may suggest a focus on existing resources in your organization and the organizational savvy to shift talented resources to another role and career path. Outsourced staff is viable and can overcome the “we cannot be a prophet in your own land” mindset. Outsourced staff can be credible, like a general contractor can leverage one set of skills and experience to build various buildings. Plan for the time for this talent search because people of this caliber are more challenging to find and may take longer to hire. Mitigate the risks of renting a project manager by obtaining a firm agreement to the end of the lease and to the transition plan executed when the lease is up.
Focusing on knowing the team, launching PMO services in alignment with team size and customer base, and ensuring credible PMO service providers will create a rock-star PMO team.
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