Position PMO Metrics in Organization

The original title of this section (in our paper) was “Position Metrics to PMO Levels.”  We had a difficult time with labelling it because it isn’t a simple concept, so I’ll let the original paper explaining

Metrics need to be planted in the right organizational unit(s).  Some metrics may not apply to every level of the PMO structure and should be collected by a particular PMO level.  In addition, metrics may be available at one level, but it would be meaningless if decomposed or rolled up to the next. 

Finally, budget and execution responsibility ownership at an organizational level should imply metrics responsibility at that same level,  If a measure is not useful at a particular PMO level – e.g., trends or issues are hard to determine – it may be a symptom that [it will] prove difficult to hold that organization accountable for poor budget or execution.

This last point took a while to become clear.  We realized that trying to hold the regions responsible for what they couldn’t [mostly] control would be counterproductive…

At SAP, project profitability and schedule performance are driven by project performance, so local and regional PMOs are closer to the data.  The Global PMO drives rollout and execution of the PM Maturity and Project Controlling initiatives, so it reports against these metrics.

While PM Maturity measured regional performance, it was clear that it was a global responsibility (with regions accountable for the result).  Assigning responsibility (FYI, we use RACI) for something like Project Controlling was more challenging.  The budget, systems, resources, etc. sat in global organizations, though not all were owned by the Global PMO.   The change management and adoption took place in the regions. 

Table reflects SAP PMO Metrics after review, re-alignment, and positioning in the organization (note some company-confidential measures are excluded).

Perspective	Current Metric	Global or Regional Ownership	Notes
Financial	Project Profitability	Regional	Clearly regional, they are accountable for the numbers
Customer	Customer References (tangible Success Stories)	Regional	Regions typically resisted, but peer pressure — when regions published success stories — prompted compliance.
	Internal Stakeholder Satisfaction	Regional
Employee	PM Training Coverage	Regional
	PMP Certification Success	Regional
Project/ Process	Organizational PM Maturity	Global	Again, regions we clearly accountable for performance, though global is becoming more accountable for generating recommendations, developing action items, and measuring progress w/r/t those follow-up items.
	Project Schedule Performance	Regional
	Project Controlling	Global	Unfortunately, we never resolved the issue.  The Project Controlling RACI was not clear enough, for some regions held themselves ACCOUNTABLE for the rollout, while others thought they were only RESPONSIBLE. This difference held “R” regions to magnify feature/function gaps to justify building stand-alone systems (to report the schedule and profit numbers they clearly were responsible for). Also, global found itself accountable, without having insisted upon the control it needed to make the approach work (at least not fully).

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