PMOs are a relatively modern phenomenon. The earliest known maps include cave drawings from around 16,500BC and even older maps inscribed on mammoth tusks. That's a lot of Lessons Learned that PMOs can draw knowledge from! In this article we explore what PMO people and Cartographers have in common, and what we can learn from the pioneers of map making.

Thanks to the growing number of CRM systems with API interfaces, and messaging systems such as Slack that positively embrace the use of bots, more and more simple tasks can be automated. PMOs should be taking advantage.

How many times have you bemoaned the erratic, irrational and illogical decisions that have been made, causing projects to deliver late, dependencies to be missed and seemingly disparate projects to clash? Cogitative Biases effect projects deliver and PMO success. But they can be mitigated and controlled. Here are six to watch out for. 

Are you Agile or are you Waterfall? Scrum or Kanban? PRINCE2 or PMBOK? To become true business catalysts, PMOs need to rise above the debate and become framework pragmatists. 

Marketing and Agile are a match made in heaven. And PMOs have an important role to play in helping Marketing teams take the Agile plunge.

The US Senate has unanimously approved the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act.  PMI are pretty excited about the bill - they have been vocal about their endorsement of the bill. But what does it mean for Project Management professionals?

An interesting example of Agile in the construction industry that almost lead to London, UK having a tower to rival the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The problem with lessons learned reports is that they are usually sterilized to the point of being meaningless.

Call3 is a new way of sharing lessons with a simple premise: When project managers initiate new projects, they must call three nominated people and have a 30 minute conversation with them about the project. 

We are in an age where we can (and do) gather increasing amounts or data about our organizations, projects, suppliers, markets and people. These sources could be used to make better data-driven decisions about how we deliver projects and seek to extract value from them. But despite the obvious potential, few PMOs have made progress with tapping into this pool of data.

When delivering within fixed iterations to high standards of quality, the only thing you can flex is the scope. Combining the simplicity or MoSCoW with the customer-centric view that Kano provides, gives us a powerful lexicon with which to explore the mix of requirements we are delivering and make effective decisions.

You could argue that if there was one single thing that you would expect PMOs to be good at, it would be Metrics. After all, PMOs often exalt the mantra that 'the PMO is the single voice of truth!'. 

But PMO analysts seem to be far less savvy about the metrics that are important in agile environments. Well never fear - we've pulled together the definitive collection of Agile Metrics for your performance indicating pleasure...

Recently, several people have commented that as a profession, PMO and Projects people tend to be negative. But are we really?

Traffic-light status reports can be used to conduct macro-analysis, revealing trends in your project portfolios that the PMO can help mitigate.

PMOs are amazing repositories of data. But what good is our data if it sits, languishing in spreadsheets or PPM tools? Data is there to help us understand what's going on. By making that data visual, we make it easier to see patterns in the data.