Staff Support and IT Organization Culture

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The PMO can contribute to the overall health of the IT organization in any number of ways. Through its process stewardship, the PMO promotes service and project delivery discipline but also a strong sense of joint ownership and responsibility for customer satisfaction within the greater IT team. Although PMO personnel monitor commitments and keep their colleagues accountable through measurement and reporting, these efforts also encourage a culture of continuous improvement through on-the-job learning and self-correction. If the PMO is established and promoted in this fashion, over time its practices will lead to a healthier, more collaborative work environment for all IT personnel. In turn, these developments will strengthen employee retention and reduce turnover, which are very tangible benefits to the organization. See Exhibit 5.

Exhibit 5: The PMO ROI — Staff Support

Value/Cost Categories	Amount of Financial Benefit/Non-PMO IT Costs	IT Costs Avoidance Associated with Service Delivery Risk Mitigation	IT Costs Avoidance Associated with Project Delivery Risk Mitigation		PMO Investments in Services and Risk Mitigation	Outcomes (Net Value of Positive Outcomes and Risk Avoidance Less PMO Costs)	Comments
Staffing Costs
Management training
Technical training
Retention
Recruiting

As the PMO builds the IT organization's knowledge store, it captures the histories of IT's successes and failures. It will also document all of IT's practices and standards. In doing so, the PMO creates the very materials needed to provide applied management and technical training to the rest of the IT organization. Rather than spending large sums on more generic staff training and development programs, the PMO team itself (or in conjunction with other corporate training experts) could provide much more focused and relevant offerings to the team at costs well below commercial rates.

Finally, the work of the PMO may be employed as the basis for IT employee evaluation. As part of its work regimen, the office captures individual and team accomplishments, as well as the associated measures of customer satisfaction. This data may be integrated with the unit's performance review process to link more clearly awards and recognition with the standards of best practice and delivery as promoted by IT management. Such a process demonstrates the IT organization's commitment to aligning what it does with the needs of the enterprise. These practices, in turn, send a strong positive message to your team and your customers alike. They are yet another example of how the work of the PMO enables the mission of its parent IT organization.

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