EPMO Best Practices

[KristinLa1]

Hi all, I have lots of questions for you about best practices in a PMO - furthermore in an EPMO... really curious to learn from others. Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated! Do you have an EPMO organization at you company? What are some best practices you can share? How are you using Workfront to help with these? Is the score card functionality helping you to choose which are the best projects to work on? Does anyone have any pointers for getting a true enterprise level score card when different departments have varying metrics? Are you prioritizing projects in Workfront? And how? (We've tried to use Portfolio Optimization, but as an EPMO we work with a number of business units and untieing the portfolio/program hierarchy as we have it would be difficult) How are you using Workfront templates to assist in developing best practices and leading corporate governance? How are your PMs collaborating with eachother in you organization outside of projects? Any way to get that into Workfront? How can your PMs learn from eachother? Are you tracking lessons learned in Workfront? FYI - I think it'd be great to get a PMO focused user group going so all of us non-marketing/retail/etc. folks can chat too :)

[RobertGo]

Sorry no answers yet. And we are not ready to address enterprise PMO needs yet, just IS division capacity needs here. As a 19-month-old Workfront client,our focus has been to understand the IS resource capacity to address the work needs. To get there, our simple project management standards have focused on assigning planned hours to resources over timeframes. And we have recently implmenented a gated IS project intake workflow. From there we have Workfront tell us about the impacts of existing work and new work on resources, near term and far term. The next major challenge for us will be establishing and then reflecting in Workfront enterprise project priorities through our goverance councils/committees to better direct resource usage.

[DavidCo3]

Hi Kristin, I had been meaning to reply but had not got around to it yet due to the number and depth of questions involved! I suspect a few others are in the same basket :) My quick answers are as in green below. Like you, I am keen to support PMO-related discussions in this forum... Do you have an EPMO organization at you company? No t at this point but we are working towards it . What are some best practices you can share? How are you using Workfront to help with these? Is the score card functionality helping you to choose which are the best projects to work on? Does anyone have any pointers for getting a true enterprise level score card when different departments have varying metrics? I am considering trialling this for an area of our business but have no experience to share as-yet. Are you prioritizing projects in Workfront? Yes And how? Informally, via a number of measures including associated revenue, role types, resource utilisation. (We've tried to use Portfolio Optimization, but as an EPMO we work with a number of business units and untieing the portfolio/program hierarchy as we have it would be difficult) How are you using Workfront templates to assist in developing best practices and leading corporate governance? We are really starting to build on our reporting utilising a variety of task-level reporting codes. Templates will be essential to getting the base set of reporting codes consistent across projects of the same type. They also set our standard project sharing settings, and standard sets of tasks for different types of work. How are your PMs collaborating with eachother in you organization outside of projects? Any way to get that into Workfront? Aside from regular team meetings, some of our PMs also use an enterprise collaboration tool called Jive to post documents and some discussions. My preference would be to stop using this, but Workfront lacks a collaboration area for teams to discuss non-project work. How can your PMs learn from eachother? Are you tracking lessons learned in Workfront? Yes. I have posted some info in another thread regarding how we manage Risks and Issues through to Lessons Learned. Regards, David