Renke Holert
3 min read
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In February 2025, PMI released a practice guide for project management offices. Here is a brief overview.
The guide Project Management Offices: A Practice Guide consists of three parts and an appendix. The first part introduces a modern understanding of a PMO that is value- and customer-oriented. It also provides a comprehensive service catalog that PMOs can use to develop their own offering.
The second part presents the framework for the PMO as a whole (the PMO Value Ring Framework); among other things, it also introduces the process for developing and optimizing PMO services.
The third part explains every step of this process and describes in detail what is required to create awareness of a service, identify the demand, demonstrate its value, develop the service, onboard customers, ensure operations, monitor and improve it, and ultimately deliver the value and receive recognition for it.
In addition to the description of the approach, each step comes with questionnaires for assessing the current maturity level. The appendix also lists, among other things, the expectations that management, project managers, and all other PMO customers typically have of a PMO and maps them to the corresponding services.
From the guide to a PMO service that actually runs
The guide is very precise about which services a PMO should offer and how to evidence their value. In practice, implementation rarely fails because of the concept. It fails because the service catalog, the maturity assessment and the value evidence are not reflected in the tools the organization already uses – and therefore stay invisible in day-to-day work.
This is where we come in. Holert has been implementing and optimizing project, product and portfolio management for PMOs and VMOs for over 25 years: methodically based on established standards such as PMI and SAFe, technically with Microsoft and Atlassian as well as the Altus PPM and Projectum xPM add-ons. That turns the guide's service catalog into day-to-day operations – portfolio and resource planning, project controlling with Power BI, and governance structures your PMO customers actually use. Our customer references show what this looks like at companies such as Rohde & Schwarz, KUKA and Amer Sports; you can read more about our approach on our about us page.
