#148 | PMO Trends 2025: Future-Proofing Your Project Office - BONUS EPISODE

What if Project Management Offices (PMOs) are the unsung heroes of organizational success in a post-pandemic world? This episode promises to unlock insights into how global events have reshaped PMOs, emphasizing their growing significance, and why your contribution to this field matters now more than ever.

As we navigate through anticipated PMO trends for 2025, discover the transformative power of AI and hybrid models in strategic alignment and agile delivery. We share real-world experiences of companies grappling with visibility and alignment issues, illustrating the necessity for PMOs to step into strategic roles. Learn how sustainability and social responsibility are emerging as key factors in project prioritization, and how advanced data analytics can elevate PMO efficiency and automation, ultimately driving organizational success.

Finally, explore strategies for future-proofing PMOs through innovation and incremental change. The episode highlights the resurgence of PMOs and the importance of change management today. 

This episode was recorded from Fatimah's keynote presentation at The PMO Leader's 4 Annual Global Conference.

In this episode we discuss:

• 0:00 PMO Trends and Insights for 2025
• 12:23 Key PMO Trends for 2025
• 22:19 Embracing Hybrid Models and Sustainability
• 29:45 AI and Change Management in PMO
• 37:59 Future-Proofing PMO Trends
• 42:27 Driving PMO Innovation and Future-Proofing
• And more!

Links discussed and shared on the day include:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fatimahabbouchi
https://thepmoplaybook.substack.com/
https://www.thepmoleader.com

Transcript

PMO Trends and Insights for 2025

Speaker 1 0:00

You're listening to Agile Ideas, the podcast hosted by Fatima Rabuchi. For anyone listening out there not having a good day, please know there is help out there. So what we'll be covering today I mentioned we're going to look back and reflect on 2024. We're not over yet, but we're almost there, and it's definitely been a lot of amazing and interesting events and activities that have happened in the PMO space across the world. So we're going to share some of that as well. For those that have not been aware of what's been happening, we're also going to look ahead. So what does 2025 hold?

Speaker 1 0:35

Typically, when you speak to some PMO leaders, they don't like to talk in predictions. I know many that don't, and I'm not suggesting the predictions are predictions, but more just in terms of trends and insights that are actually happening around the world of PMO as well. So we'll be talking about that and we'll also share with you some lessons and observations across the key areas and themes. And then we'll talk a little bit about continuous improvement and, as I mentioned earlier, I'll also share some links to some resources to help you and some ideas that you can take forward with you today. So let's start by just recapping some of the feedback that some of you submitted includes themes relating to these questions, which is the good thing is. We will be covering some of this throughout today's meetup, talking about the role of the PMO in terms of strategy, how it sort of links in from an agile perspective, what are some of the insights that are happening and how to apply them, and then also a couple of big ones around AI and elevating value, so we will cover that off as we go as well. So, in order to move forward, we need to look back.

Speaker 1 1:47

This is a timeline I put together as part of the 2019 white paper, and it was as a result of doing a series of research over a couple of years and speaking to and interviewing people around the world. And throughout this conversation, as you can see, on the left-hand side is the view of PMO evolution and on the right-hand side, of project management, and I've always been very vocal about project management being accelerating well ahead of PMO. Now. That's continued to be the trend for a really really long time, but there is an actual shift happening, which is quite exciting. I'm keen to share some of that with you in just a sec.

Speaker 1 2:33

The main thing you can see from this evolution timeline really is around, that every instance of PMO, from all the way dating back to the 1900s, really was just very light touch and was always as a result of a delivery need. And it wasn't really until PRINCE2 started referencing the term PMO or Project Support Office, and then later PMBOK followed through, then P3O and then Agile, where the actual references to PMO were very much always just merged in and blended in with delivery. So we never really had our own sort of two feet to stand on, if you like. But the good news is, for the first time I think in 20 years I probably see the biggest shift has been happening in the last two or three years and I think that potentially COVID's been a big contributor to this, because we've had to accelerate a lot of things and also the learnings of agile transformations. Not going so well has also opened up the opportunity and the door for PMOs, regardless of what term you use and what you call PMOs. So I'm curious to know how many of you feel free to put in the chat if this sort of trend, historical trend, is something that you've seen before, you're familiar with. Were you aware that the reference to PMOs really started around the 1900s and is anything that surprises you, please put it into the chat. I'm curious to know if this is new information or something that you already knew.

Speaker 1 4:05

As we look back now I want to take you forward and let me show you some of the exciting things that have been taking place, and some of these most of these have only been in the last 12 months, which is really, really exciting. So some of the biggest things that have happened. For those of you that aren't aware, there is a global alliance community called the PMO Global Alliance, head up by AmeriCo, who's done a really good job over the last 10, 15 years in building a global community that is focused and centred around PMO. They've got a number of things within that community and that has grown so much so that it is now the time where the PMI, the Project Management Institute, has acquired PMO Global Alliance. Why is this relevant? Because it shows, for the first time ever, that PMO's place in society and place in the world is becoming of a lot more importance. So I think that that shift there is quite big.

Speaker 1 5:07

You'll also see there's been a number of other things. We had one of the largest gathering of project management leaders, with a huge emphasis on PMOs in Saudi Arabia this year. You also had the annual PMI conference in the US, which happens every year, but there was a number of announcements happening around that this year. And then also we've seen the largest South African conference on PMO, which ran in July this year, and I'm pleased to say that a number of people involved in leading that are actually helping to deliver the PMO Leader Conference that's on next week as well. So why am I telling you this? This is so important because it's the first time I've ever seen this much development or evolution in the PMO space. So I think it's really exciting and if you have anything to do with PMO whether you're a PMO leader or a recipient of PMO services and capabilities, or maybe you're an executive looking at how this can potentially help it's really exciting. Is there anything that I haven't mentioned that is really big news in PMO that you wanted to share? If you do, please put it in the chat, because I think it would be really useful and helpful for us to know about those things. And, yeah, definitely celebrate this as a big win for the PMO community.

Speaker 1 6:21

So, just moving on in terms of what we said around trends last year, so last year, my team. On an annual basis, we released what we think the trends are, and the three key trends that we talked about last year were around adaptive governance, ai, automation integration and ESG. Now, when we look at the adaptive governance piece, this is the bridging the gap between traditional and more agile based methods and models and tools and processes and bringing the worlds together, doing so in a way that works for the organization itself. There has been a huge interest in the term agile governance, which has been a high search term in Google, and there's also been an increase in the prevalence of governance related items, specifically in methods and models that exist around not just agile, but even more traditional frameworks as well, so there's definitely been an increase in desire to know more about it and also some gaps, which I'll talk to you about in just a second.

Speaker 1 7:32

The other one is AI and automation integration, so this one's been really interesting. I had someone on LinkedIn the other day say AI-tomation and I thought that was quite a clever way of calling AI and automation, so I'm going to give him credit for that. I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but there's definitely been an increase, and now almost every PPM tool, at least the ones that are quite large, have embedded if not already have been doing so at a rapid pace different AI feature sets within the tools themselves. And that's not all. Organizations that are using tools like Atlassian, jira, confluence, microsoft Teams and others are also seeing a series of different AI tools that come out. In fact, atlassian's just released Atlassian Rovo, which is also another really interesting AI-related tool that will help organizations. So that's definitely prevalent and happening. And the other one was ESG. So ESG was one of those ones that sort of started popping its head up, and this has a lot to do with the overarching organizational pressures around sustainability and some of the industries that are needing to meet a number of different sustainable development goals that are referenced in the UN's list, and so there's a little bit more happening in this ESG space as well.

Speaker 1 8:53

Just a quick yes or no. Are these trends things that you've seen or experienced this year? Do you feel that they're accurate? Sort of three of the top ones, curious to know if we're off the money or on the mark there, yes or no? Feel free to put your yes or no in the chat. Yes, okay, yep, cool, okay, good, cool, okay, good, yeses I'm mostly seeing yeses so far. That's good. Ai yes, absolutely. If you haven't heard about AI, we're living under rocks. Seriously, it's quite crazy. Okay, so let's have a look. Now what I want to take you into is forward looking, so let's have a look at before sorry, before I have a look at 2025, just let me recap one more thing around 2024.

Speaker 1 9:51

So the PMO squad, which is a partner of ours in the US, did a very large survey this year.

Speaker 1 9:57

They do it every year and their research report outlined a number of interesting statistics. If you have a look at the number, they had about 160 responses, which is quite good for a PMO survey. They typically don't have that many. But overall, if you have a look at some of the statistics, the interesting ones that I just wanted to call out is someone mentioned value. So 70% of PMOs don't have a formal process around assessing value. I think with the new certifications and licensing scheme that PMI is putting out around PMOs, it's probably going to start changing, so we'll have to stay tuned and see what comes of that. But then also, 93% of unsupported PMOs say that executives lack understanding of that value. Now, the key word here is unsupported PMOs, so we probably have to dig deeper into the research here, but it still seems to me that there are many PMOs that don't have that executive lens and executive support that's needed. So I think there's definitely an opportunity for us as PMOs to actually close and bridge that gap for value, and we'll talk a little bit about that as well.

Key PMO Trends for 2025

Speaker 1 11:10

And the last one I wanted to mention here, looking at referencing some of these, is when you have a look at integration of technologies and tools. There's definitely a bigger demand on PMOs, at least for all the clients we work with and I've seen we've worked with about 30 different companies in the last eight years alone but there's definitely an integration piece around technology tools that are coming in, particularly around collaboration and project management. They're not coming in through IT, they're actually being sort of brought in from the ground up, and I think PMOs can play a really big part in helping to bring in those tools, embed those tools and actually make sure that the companies get the best investment out of them. Overall, when we think about PMOs in the past and PMOs now and if you've been in it as long as I have you'll find that there's actually a shift and the shift is really exciting. And I think AI and automation itself is actually going to make our jobs a little bit easier in helping us to bring some of that data that supports decision making to the front. I think, overall, thinking about what we can do, there's a huge element around change and I'll touch on that in just a moment. So that's looking back.

Speaker 1 12:23

Now let's move forward and look at what we think 2025 is going to have on the horizon for us. Before I tell you what we think, keen, if you could just put your notes in the chat what do you think are the major trends of 2025 in the PMO space? Put your thoughts in the chat. Let's have a quick look at them and see how close or far we are in terms of what we are predicting as 2025. I'll give you a minute to do that and I'm keen to delve into that a bit more. Anyone going to share some thoughts? Don't be shy. Meetups are all about collaboration, all right, while some of us may be typed a little bit slower than others, so that's fine. Keep putting in there and I'll take you through.

Speaker 1 13:30

Yes, cathy, you're right. Ai absolutely is one of those ones, and there's no reason why the things that are on the 2024 list can't be on the 2025 list. Adaptive PMO yes, versus directive dynamic exactly. Interestingly, that one just continues to come up. I was reading something recently and someone was talking about explaining what the P in PMO means again, and I just felt like saying why we're fixating too much on the what and less on the how, and the how is more important. But let me tell you a little bit about what I think the major trends are when it comes to 2025. Now remember, these trends are based on conversations with clients, conversations with the PMO leader community, looking at the research and the reports that are coming through, understanding what my peers are doing in this space and really just bringing together that view and putting it into perspective. So these are the major trends.

Speaker 1 14:33

We'll delve into each one individually in just a sec, but before I move on, is there anything on this list that is surprising for you? Is there anything you know, starting from the top strategic line being one, agile hybrid. Two, sustainability. Three, advanced data. Four and five, change management One to five. Is any one of these a surprise that it's on the list? Feel free to. Okay, I would be surprised if there was anything that was a surprise of this list, but the one that I think maybe is the most surprising is the change management one. So I would expect that someone might pick up on that one and say why is that on the list? But I'll explain.

Speaker 1 15:22

So let me go into beautiful, okay, perfect, all right, we're on the right track. So let's get into the first one strategic alignment. So I'm going to share some insights and a couple of things for you to consider in relation to this. So we've known for an ever in a day that strategic alignment is absolutely critical. Unfortunately, for a very long time and I've been in this position myself in the past many PMOs don't have a seat at the executive table. They don't have that strategic oversight and visibility. Not all of them, but many. If you think about all of the PMOs that we sort of talk to, many of them are sitting, you know, within a program or within a function, very, very in deep within the particular department area. If they're at the enterprise level, they've more likely got that strategic alignment lens and they're usually focused on the investment side of things. But for the first time, I feel like we're actually getting PMO and the strategic thinking hat on and really driving that strategic alignment. I'll give you an example Working with a client recently, a mid-sized company who is intending on IPOing in future, they had no visibility on the number of projects they were running at any point in time and going through a process to help them ascertain a list of projects For the size of budget they spend per annum on projects, which is not that much.

Speaker 1 16:46

They had over 96 projects. The manager director at the time, when seeing this list, had absolutely no idea there was that many projects running. A lot of them were pet projects that people were running sort of off the side of their desk for their own personal needs. The challenge here was what do we do with that 96? And so, with the PMO hat on, we actually went through a process to actually map those projects, using a number of different metrics to assess the viability, the feasibility of them and actually decide and help decide rather of the executives to choose what stays in and what stays out.

Speaker 1 17:26

The project list, out of the 96, I would say only a third really matched the organizational strategic objectives. And why do I know that? It's because they had strategic software that maps strategic objectives, but they didn't have a PPM or an equivalent tool. So this is why I'm starting getting a bit out of hand. There was no direct correlation between the two. So taking a more strategic role really helped this organization to shift the visibility that they had on that projects list and actually helped them realize that, of all the projects they had estimated budgets for all, once we collated that information they only really had budget in that year to spend on 25 of them. So there's a very big disconnect and this is where the PMO can really step up.

Speaker 1 18:12

Whether you run a PMO yourself or you have PMOs working for you, having a clear, visible pipeline of initiatives at all times is absolutely critical. One of the top things that I would focus on in every engagement. In fact, it is the number one problem. If I look back at all of that data we've collated from all of our clients, the number one challenge they have is around that demand pipeline planning, strategic piece, pipeline planning, strategic piece. So overall, the PMO's role as a strategic thinker is imperative and it's becoming more prominent.

Speaker 1 18:49

Someone asked earlier in the pre-verbage that I showed around how to drive more value or how to show more value. Well, taking the opportunity to be more of a strategic thinker will really go a long way in helping Overall, those PMOs that are more ingrained in the strategy side of things are more likely to not only be around longer but actually be given the support, the resources to continue that growth. When we look at recent stats from the PMI's PMO report, you can see that they say now that 72% of PMOs are aligned directly to strategic objectives. That's a big shift on what was previous surveys of a similar nature. So one thing I will call out for you to think about, to take away with this particular trend, is when you think about an executive, all of us, and especially executives and the bigger the company, the more complex are inundated with information at all times. So, as PMOs, one of the best things that we can do that drives a lot of value and may seem so simple and so administrative is actually to help simplify the data into actionable insights and then provide that to executives. It'll help them make decisions faster. It'll help them make decisions that are not only objective but subjective as well, and it will also help to show you as the strategic advisor. So I think there's a really big opportunity here for PMOs in a strategic thinking role. Think there's a really big opportunity here for PMOs in a strategic thinking role Key to your thoughts. If anyone's got any on this, please feel free to chat in the chat and just let me know whether there was anything there that was specifically resonated for you.

Speaker 1 20:36

Let's get into number two. So the second one is agile-based and hybrid methodologies. Now you'll notice I use the word agile-based. Whenever you use the word agile methodologies, the agile purists come at you because agile itself is not a methodology. But a lot of people refer to waterfall and agile as methodologies, but there are a lot of frameworks, models, tools, methods that are based on agile concepts and principles that are based on Agile concepts and principles. And likewise, when you merge traditional ways of working and traditional methods and traditional processes and tools, et cetera, that are either based on waterfall style or based on Agile style, those two things together is what I refer to hybrid.

Embracing Hybrid Models and Sustainability

Speaker 1 21:16

I said recently and I think it caught a lot of people off guard but nobody owns hybrid. Hybrid methodology is not something that any company came up with. It's not owned by PMI. It's just a simple way of basically bringing together different types of methods, models, and bringing it together to make something work for you and your organisation. So I think it's really important to see that and understand that. And I'll be honest with you I've not worked in one company and there's been 25 or 30 in the last eight years alone that have ever been pure agile or pure waterfall with no aspects of agile in it. And to give you an example, even when companies roll out safe, there's aspects still that they keep particularly around the investment management process that isn't very agile. And organisations that say that they are pure agile tend to still have a lot of overheads and things that stall that progress. So we'll talk about that in adaptive governance in just a minute.

Speaker 1 22:19

Just looking at the note around change management critical to help clients integrate absolutely, I'm going to touch on change management in just a minute and there's a reason why change management has come into the conversation. But again, I just implore you to understand that hybrid is nothing special, it's not unique. I can't give you the framework for it. It's just a mixing and matching of things that work for you. Give you the framework for it, it's just a mixing and matching of things that work for you. So by 2025, really, I think hybrid delivery models itself are going to become far more obvious and that's because, particularly at least here in Australia, we've had a huge uptake of agile-based methods and models and frameworks. Frameworks and those are some really well-known ones and over the last sort of five or six years, particularly when the banks started the trend, and now it's a lot more industry, a lot more companies. They're finding that they actually have to take you know what's over here that's flavored agile and actually blend it with what they've got and actually start to figure out a way to bring the two together. So I think the blended approach is necessary.

Speaker 1 23:24

Just a little quick story or piece of advice. I once worked with a transport company mid-sized transport company and the enterprise PMO leader at the time wanted us to develop five different methodologies and most of them were based on Prince 2, but they wanted one for marketing projects and they wanted one for IT projects and they wanted one for continuous improvement and they wanted one for, I think was construction of the trailers. So they wanted all these different methodologies. Now they say the customer's always right and they're obviously paying. So you do have to sort of balance between giving them advice and listening to what they want. But one of the things that we helped them understand is there's risks associated with doing that, because it adds complexity, because then they had five times the templates, five times the tools, five times the governance and it was very, very complicated five times the governance and it was very, very complicated.

Speaker 1 24:21

So when we look at adaptive, an adaptive way of doing this, what I find very helpful is putting in place specific guardrails or guidelines, sort of like when you're bowling in the bowling alley and you've got the bumpers. The bumpers help you stay within the lines, but effectively, how you get there and how efficient, how slow, how fast, how many balls, how many pins, is really up to you. That's probably the more effective way of doing it and not doing it in isolation of your stakeholders as well. So that's a bit about agile-based and hybrid. I'd be surprised if anyone today has not heard about hybrid. If you haven't heard about hybrid before, please let me know, because I'd be very surprised if that's the case. And if you haven't, that's fine, but at least you now know what it is.

Speaker 1 25:10

So sustainability and social responsibility. So ESG was a theme in last year and we maintain it's a theme in this year. Maintain it's a theme in this year and it's really exciting because for the first time ever, I think, I was a contributor to provide a testimonial for a book that was written by a group of PMO professionals around the world, led by Iman Debo, who is in Bahrain, and she wrote a book called Green PMO. Now, originally, when the idea came forward, I was like what's this about? But as it evolved, it actually shows just how helpful it is for PMOs to integrate sustainability and social responsibility into not only projects themselves, but into the way that we work as well.

Speaker 1 25:57

Now, I'm not an expert in this space, but what I can tell you is that, with the pressure that's coming from external governance and things like that, such as those mentioned before, there is definitely a shift, particularly in more industries like renewables and energy and mining maybe more so, but even now we're starting to see a little bit more of that percolating. In Europe, for example, there's quite a new regulation around it as well, so there's a lot more pressure on organisations, who have now got stricter evaluations that they need to meet and therefore they have new skills that they need to meet and therefore they have new skills that they need to meet as well. And so having a having a metric, for example, in energy last year, when we were putting together the matrix to prioritize initiatives against, we made sure that there was sustainability related criteria for which projects were ranked against. Now, it wasn't the highest ranking, so compliance usually ranks highest and they're non-negotiables, but where we could, we embedded that, and that helped to provide visibility, in particular, around how the sustainability and social responsibility piece comes into it. Why am I telling you this and why is it relevant for PMOs? Well, pmos generally, particularly those that are of strategic nature, are at the forefront of what's happening in this space. Why? Because they're the ones that see all the projects and help with the prioritisation and help with the planning. So you've got a really good opportunity to be involved in that, and so I would recommend in this particular space is just to pay attention to it and if you are building some sort of prioritization tools, maybe include that as a metric, even if it doesn't rank as highly as others, such as cost or risk. So that's my two.

Speaker 1 28:01

So this one, and this relates back to talking about AI, so advanced data analytics and data integration. So one of the biggest shifts that we're seeing in this space is not only are there a lot more tools out there that help from an AI perspective, but also a lot of the tools that we typically would use day to day, and a lot of the PPM tools as well that we use in projects are starting to have a lot more AI integrations into those tools, and that's really helping to frame up how PMOs can use those tools to drive greater automation. As an example, a lot of companies that we've been working with many of them have Microsoft Teams platforms and products and they're starting to integrate tools like Power Automate, microsoft Flow. Other companies that don't use the Microsoft Suite are using tools like Zapier and they're starting to figure out and find ways of integrating and bringing different processes and tools together to drive not only decision making but actually to support project monitoring, project tracking, completing processes, submitting processes for approval sorry, creating processes for approvals just streamlining the way that they work. And so there's kind of two parts here the data side and having tools to help accelerate the data you can access, and then there's the AI side, which is also really interesting and exciting. Studies have shown that there is a 30 percent reduction in project overruns and improved resource allocation, and my big takeaway is less prone to human error, particularly when those tools are used well.

Speaker 1 29:45

So, thinking about your own PMO or your space, how can you use AI tools to not only free up time of your team but also delivery, and then also thinking about from a data perspective earlier we talked about that strategic thinker how do you better leverage data that you're collating? No one likes to collate data and not use the data, so that's one of the pet peeves of any delivery team. So if you're going to collect data, make sure you do something with it. As an example, one of the things we did for a government department last year is they were running a very large $30, $40 million program of work and they had it was an enterprise-wide transformation in the HR space, hrif space, and they needed to integrate quite a lot of things across multiple divisions within this business, and so one of the things we did is we used a number of different automation tools to actually link together dependencies linked to risks and risks linked to issues and issues linked to actions and decision making. So every time you would open up an action or a decision and we use simple tools in SharePoint and other things you can actually see that where a risk can eventuate into an issue or when an issue had an associated dependency, and it just made visibility a lot easier and made decision-making easier because executives could dig into that further and actually understand where something had arisen from. So that sort of knowledge management and traceability is really, really key, and I think a lot more AI related tools and also automation tools itself is helping us to drive that as well.

Speaker 1 31:26

How many of you have utilized AI or automation tools in your PMOs today? Yes, no. Have you experimented with it? Is it something you've tried or want to try? Kind of keen to ascertain from you If it's something you're familiar with, yes or no, or a thumbs up smiley, something like that would be fine. Yes, okay, collaboration not for PMO. Okay, not yet. Okay. I'm curious as well for those that haven't. Is it, um, not sure where to start, is it? You know, sometimes it's like cost prohibitive in some companies and in some companies it is also something that is not necessarily supported, and what I mean by that is I once worked with a client who had this lady in the business who was really good at introducing new tools and working with the tools and building the tools and experimenting with the tools.

Speaker 1 32:39

She brought in jira and confluence and all these other different tools, but the problem was nobody else knew how to use them. Nobody else knew how they were being used. And so she ended up building all the business processes and all these different project things and connected it all together and had a requirements and all these bits and pieces together. But the problem is going back to the earlier point about change management. It was so what? Nobody else was using it. If you spend all your time investing in a tool and don't implement change management to bring that visibility and use case to your stakeholders, then you're effectively going to shoot yourself in the foot because you're going to be the only one that actually uses it, and a tool is only as good as the data that you put in and, obviously, those using it. So it's definitely one to consider.

Speaker 1 33:31

I'm familiar with ClickUp. Clickup typically used in sort of SME-sized businesses and sort of like a holistic CRM-type platform, and then in utilities. It's interesting Some are more advanced than others. I did some work in utilities for two companies last year who moved to an agile way of working and they've started to tease that out a little bit more. But if I'm really honest, they were under utilizing things as simple as SharePoint and other tools as well. So I definitely think not as mature as they need to be. And then, yes, monday's definitely another one, which again is is is a more, has been more of a tool that's used, was targeted at small businesses, but overall is actually now trying to become like a bit of a pseudo ppm.

Speaker 1 34:18

Um, again, there's pros and cons with all of these things, and I think the key thing I would call out is when you introduce any new tool, think about the integrations with other tools that potentially may come to bear. So, um, what you don't want is in banking, a couple of years ago, all of the business requirements were done in Microsoft Word by the business team, who don't use JIRA as an example and then all of the technology development, code testing, all of the requirements related relating to what the business asked for from a technical perspective was in JIRA, and what do you think happened? The two didn't align. Why? Because business was updating manually, they hadn't got on the automation or tools bandwagon, and then technology was running off in JIRA. So you have to make sure that the tools speak to each other and that your stakeholders know how you're using them as well.

Speaker 1 35:14

So let's go to the last one now, and the last one is change management. So the reason I've introduced change management here is because I do think there's a couple of things happening from a change management perspective. Now, change management itself and if there's anyone on the call today that is a change management professional or an expert in this space as well as being maybe in the PMO space, the value that good change management brings is insurmountable. It is critical and necessary, but unfortunately it is not getting the same, I guess, airtime, similar to where PMO was five, six years ago. That's sort of where change management is in a lot of capacities. They're not getting, I guess, the support or the funding and in some instances not even being given the opportunity. So change management in an agile environment has sort of been, in some companies, just lumped into the team. So I've seen scrum masters wearing a coaching hat, a scrum master hat and a change management hat. I've also seen implementation analyst roles that also change people and so it's not really getting the right visibility.

Future-Proofing PMO Trends

Speaker 1 36:24

So in the absence of having proper change management capabilities and functions and center of excellence, I think it's up to us as PMOs to take it into our own hands. And in many instances where we don't have change management, I'm running a program at the moment and there is no change manager. So we need to introduce change management and communications, and so we're starting to bring in some of that ourselves. So I think having some of that skill would be really valuable for you as PMO professionals, and it really goes a long way and also makes the role of PMO more valuable. And having good change management can ultimately help you increase the positioning of the PMO and also, hopefully, you end up getting the change management resources. One of the ways that I would suggest to start is by looking at your current processes and where there are gaps in that and assessing that in terms of how you would plug those gaps. Everything you do in PMO, as small or as big as it is, think of it as a bit of a change. I like to call the smaller initiatives micro projects, and they all need some change management. So I think that PMO's leading change is not to take away from change managers doing the change, but where you don't have that capability or you don't have that resource, we have to take the lead and really step up. So that's my two cents on change management Before I move on to some lessons and observations, any questions or any comments, before we move on to the next section of today or any comments.

Speaker 1 37:59

Before we move on to the next section of today, I'll keep an eye as you go through the chat. Feel free to jump in with questions if this is your chance to do so. Change my yep absolutely. Like I said, it's definitely not to replace change managers. They are worth their weight in gold when they're really, when they're really good. When they're not good, maybe not so much, but yeah, we definitely definitely need to think about that.

Speaker 1 38:20

Um, change of center of excellency well, it really depends if change is brand new to the organization or whether it's an existing center of excellence that is somewhere else in the organization, the larger organizations, depending on how they've sort of implemented their equivalent of PMO. So in energy, for example, I seen them have. We did an orchestration function and within the orchestration function it had all your traditional PMO and it had change management in there. So the center of excellence for that was in there, but they also had an agile coaching center of excellence and a number of others as well, whereas in other organisations it sits outside of delivery completely and is actually a partner to it. So it might report up into a different area, but ultimately the PMO and change usually report up to, like the head of delivery or something. So it really just depends. It's so different, it's so, so different.

Speaker 1 39:14

Do clients ask for specific change managers? Interestingly, unless they understand the role of change and the importance of change and some don't they don't ask for that role. In this program I'm running at the moment, I've called out the need for it so as PMOs, we can actually say, hey, these are the reasons why we need the change management, and the easiest way for you to get support for that is to list out the things that change management professionals do and say, well, when we're doing our race, who's going to cover all these things? And that's a really sort of good way of trying to get that support. But I do think change management is improving, but I think it's behind, where it needs to be, and I think there are change management communities I was at an event last week actually that are really trying to drive this change, but unfortunately it's not there yet, so hopefully we'll get some improvement.

Speaker 1 40:09

So, 2024 to 2025, what are some of the biggest lessons for you to consider before I talk to you about some future-proofing ideas? So there's a lot here. I'm not going to go through all of them. As I said, you'll have access to the video afterwards, but I just wanted to focus on a couple of key ones.

Speaker 1 40:29

One of the things I want to clearly say is your agile is not unique. In all the companies I've worked with in and around the agile space, the agile is not completely dissimilar. There are aspects that are different and if you connected to me on LinkedIn, I talked about those actually this morning but overall, one of the key things that's not happening well is PMOs are spending time. They reach out to me and they say what are the building blocks that I need to use? What are this? What are that? That's not the question to be asking. The question to be asking is how do we change the way we're working, how do we apply agility? As I always say, it's about putting agility, putting Agile into governance, not the governance into Agile, and so it's really important for PMOs for us to consider that. So that's a big observation from this year.

Speaker 1 41:19

We talked about popularity and we talked about automation. I think there's definitely a shift in terms of the work that we are doing and making sure it aligns better from a delivery perspective. I think there's a lot more governance now overseeing delivery, as opposed to being lumped together and grading your own homework, so to speak, and I also think there's a lot more appetite now for us to be learning about the AI, the automation, and also supporting the different ways of working, which has been really interesting. I think the popularity of PMO has evolved a lot because we've had that opportunity to really deal with what's happened in the last few years and adapt, and I think that organisations now that removed all sensors of PMO completely removed and removed the role completely, some of those organisations, including the big banks, are starting to bring them back in, and that just shows you the gut that it's left when they were removed previously. So let's get to future proofing and here are some opportunities for you to consider.

Speaker 1 42:27

Um, in terms of what I mentioned briefly before, we we know delivery does projects and they always will. But there are things that we can do for the PMO. In the PMO, either your teams are doing it, you're doing it yourself, and that is deliver small, incremental changes. I like to call them micro projects, and a micro project might be something that takes as long as a day or a week Very, very small, bite-sized improvements. I like to build capability with stakeholders, not for them or at them, and we can definitely do that better. I think the more you bring stakeholders on the journey, the more your changes and your processes will stick and also find ways to drive innovation. So you know, in the PMO world, you'll hear about the PMO Unconference, which is a way of doing that. That's happening later this year, run by the PMO Global Alliance.

Speaker 1 43:18

You can do something similar within your business as well, and the best thing I like to try is to bring cross-functional people together. So when I bring these cross-functional people together, I'm not asking finance to tell me how to improve finance processes. I might be asking HR questions that they can answer that may relate to another function or another department, and the cross-sharing of learnings between teams is a really good way to bring about new ideas and opportunities In the larger businesses. Sometimes we do that on a quarterly basis as part of like a quarterly business review, and then we'll allow time to do that retrospective or introspective, and then also one of the most prominent things that I recommend you do is have a feedback loop mechanism that is obvious and accessible, so there is no point in asking for feedback and then not showing those that have provided feedback, how you may have done something with it. For example, at the start of today, I shared some feedback that you guys had given us and that feedback is stuff that we've tried to incorporate in today's presentation and meetup. And then, finally, encouraging innovation but balancing risk. So finding ways to do that.

Speaker 1 44:32

Some companies like to put aside an innovation budget, albeit small, and then crowd surf ideas within the organisation, and then you might bring them together and then rank them, prioritise them and then utilise some of that funding to progress those ideas. It's actually a really interesting way that CSIRO does when they go to support, for example, not-for-profits in ideas that they have in idea generation. So there's some ideas there. If any of them resonate, let me know in the chat, because I'm keen to. Yeah, we can evolve more and I can do some more details and blogs about this as well, if it's helpful.

Speaker 1 45:12

And then, moving on to future proofing, three things I would. In addition to the continuous improvement, which I briefly just covered, there are three other things I would recommend you take away from today and so adopting hybrid methodologies so, depending on where you are in the life cycle of your organization, you might be in a position to do that better than others. If you are already, you've already inherited something. It might be a bit more challenging, but think about how important it is for you to bring together all the different ways of working that the teams are already doing and put that together in a way that makes sense. I always like to say that governance is not delivering. Delivery is not governance. So we in our PMO world need to make sure we have the right frameworks and tools and processes for us and we need to make sure we align to delivery. But delivery doesn't drive what we do, and so combining agile-based and traditional project management practices and then making sure you bring those stakeholders on the journey will ensure that you have flexibility as your projects and programs in your area continue to progress. When you have multiple, it gets really overwhelming and confusing and very hard to manage.

Speaker 1 46:36

Ai and automation. By no means an expert in this space, particularly on AI a lot more in automation, in fact. But ultimately, spend the time. You know, spend three, four hours a month just spending time playing around with it. Playing around with things, trialing things, using the different tools that are out there. You don't have to bring them in tomorrow, but just start playing around with them, you'll be surprised at how much you can automate. We have a a podcast, an agile ideas podcast, and in that podcast we've got about 25 steps just to get one episode out, and the episode is about an hour long and the 25 steps have have been, for the most part, very much automated. So it makes our life quite easy and you can do the same thing in the PMO as well.

Speaker 1 47:19

And then the third one is cultivating a continuous learning environment. So this is around upskilling. One of the things PMOs don't tend to get is a budget for training. But why shouldn't you? I would be putting a case forward around a little bit of a training plan in what it is that you're going to learn over time and then request the budget for you and your teams, even if it's incremental, to demonstrate that you're taking those learnings from things like this and then putting it back into the business. Any questions on future proofing or on continuous improvement? Future proofing or on continuous improvement? All right, if you do.

Speaker 1 48:02

We're getting close to the end of our hour today, so feel free to put it into the chat and I'll try to cover it before we wrap up. So I promised you we would end on some resources, so I'm going to share with you some resources. For those that are on the call, you've all registered via the Zoom link, so we should have the ability to email this list to you. Everything from, if you're talking about AI and automation, which I've spoken a lot about, we will share with you the two sort of sources that we've been interested and intrigued by the Atlassian Responsible Tech Principles and also the Intelligence Principles that Australia's released, and they're just available to anyone and basically relevant at any time, just for your own curiosity. For those that haven't seen it, we have an adaptive governance checklist. I am going to be making that. It's currently free and accessible to everyone, but there will be a time where that is no longer the case. It's already been downloaded over 100 times, so we'll share that with you as well.

Speaker 1 49:04

From an ESG perspective, I mentioned the book. The book. I've received my own copy. It's not something I have any affiliation with, other than writing a testimonial. If you're interested, you can have a look at that. And then also, I wanted to tell you about a couple of things that you can look at considering moving forward.

Speaker 1 49:23

We have a free conference next week. It's annual. It happens every year. We have a thousand registered participants globally and it's 16 hours of content and you're able to participate and register in that. We'll be presenting APAC part of the region and then it will go to EMEA region and in the Americas and the recordings will all be shared as well for anyone that wants to access it. We have over 60 speakers and and over 16 hours of footage being prepared. It's really exciting. So that's coming up. You can register for free. We'll send you a link for that. Exciting, so that's coming up. You can register for free. We'll send you a link for that as well, and that's open to anyone. You don't have to be in PMO. We've got people from Bupa, anz, other companies here and globally that are all coming along to be part of that event.

Speaker 1 50:06

I also have a free PMO playbook that you can subscribe to. This is everything to do with PMO only and really drives everything from how-tos, insights, techniques and goes into the meat and bones of the PMO world. And that's available to subscribe to and is free, and I will send you the link to that as well. So join over 100 other people that have that. And then my favorite one is the capability in a box concept. It's something that I have been developing for a really long time and is the glue that brings everything together.

Speaker 1 50:46

So if you're interested and looking at how you can uplift your organization's PMO moving forward, or your department, you want to put together a roadmap or a blueprint and you're really not sure where to start and you want to take the lead and be the driver of this and you don't want to bring in a consultancy to tell you how to suck eggs or to do all the work for you, but you want your team involved. We've got a really exciting workshop that will help you blueprint that whether you are at the start, middle or end of your journey and really bring together a very interesting for both virtual and in-person event for those that are interested. It's modularized. We'll build capabilities, resources, dependencies by all the capabilities you can possibly have needed. We've collated, we've got different personas and we can make it really fun and interesting. So there is an opportunity for those that are interested in working with me in that workshop. If you're based in Australia, we can do it in person together and if you're abroad, we can talk about doing something virtually using virtual Miro boards and other things like that. So I'm really keen on getting get you involved. We've got three pilot customers registered and we can talk about that as well, so if you are interested in doing a workshop with me, for that, regardless of your size and maturity, I highly recommend you reach out. Abby's just put some contact details in the chat and we'll also send out some further information Now, last but not least, stay tuned for our next meetup.

Speaker 1 52:12

You have the opportunity now. The floor is open. If you want to ask any more questions, I'm very, very happy to answer them. So, um, the floor is yours. If you want to share either feedback on today, anything you want to see in a future meetup, a question, a comment, an idea, um, we've got five minutes, so I'd love to love to hear that. Um, I can see there's been a couple of questions that abby's just sent through that have come through privately.

Speaker 1 52:36

So some, I guess, recommendations and scenarios around utilizing AI and automation. What I would recommend the easiest, two easiest places to start is if you use Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Suite or products in your business, then I would recommend, very simply, start by using I think it's still called Microsoft Flow. They might have changed it, but Microsoft Flow was the name and that is the most simplest. Like no code, easy. If this happens, then this happens. Then do that, and we've set that up to send out timesheet reminders or to remind people to approve, leave and other things. So, if you're a Microsoft user, that if you're not a Microsoft user, and Microsoft's tool is free. If you're a Microsoft user, and for those that aren't a Microsoft user, there is a tool that does charge you, unfortunately, but it is really cool, and it's called Zapier. So the Zapier tool is one that we use prolifically in our business and that would be one I'd recommend if you're not a Microsoft house. So that's the answer to that one.

Speaker 1 53:48

Any other questions? Was this helpful? We're going to send out the video and the links next week, but please do share feedback. If you're a meetup customer, you'll probably receive a link, and my favorite thing in the world is linkedin, so please tag me on linkedin if there's something today. Um, that was of value for you. Um, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for those putting in the comments. Um, a lot of effort goes into preparing things like this, so just getting the feedback meets makes me happy, so, thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Please share this with someone or rate it if you enjoyed it. Don't forget to follow us on social media and to stay up to date with all things agile ideas, go to our website, wwwagilemanagementofficecom. I hope you've been able to learn, feel or be inspired today. Until next time, what's your agile idea?