Head of PMO job description

Project management — Head of PMO
Sets delivery standards and governance across the whole portfolio.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Project Planning
- Project Scope Definition — You can spot a scope statement that will not survive delivery, because it hides an open decision or an unfunded deliverable, and get it rewritten before the plan is baselined.
- Work Breakdown Structure Development — You can review another project manager's breakdown, point to the gaps, overlaps and packages too large to track, and show them how to restructure it.
- Schedule Building and Critical Path Analysis — You can recover a slipped schedule by re-sequencing, overlapping work or cutting scope, and present each option with its cost and risk before one is chosen.
- Resource Planning and Allocation — You can set how the organisation plans people across projects, and use it to tell leadership which projects cannot be staffed as planned.
- Project Budgeting and Cost Control — You can set how project costs are estimated, approved and controlled across the organisation, and stop funding a project whose forecast no longer justifies it.

Delivery Control
- Project Status Reporting — You can roll status from several projects into one report a steering group can act on, and challenge a green rating the evidence does not support.
- Milestone and Progress Tracking — You can track progress across related projects with shared milestones, and spot when one project's slip will make another miss its date.
- Change Control and Scope Management — You can set change control policy and approval limits for the organisation, and step in when a baseline has changed so often it no longer means anything.
- Delivery Methodology Selection — You can set the organisation's delivery approaches and the rules for tailoring them, and stop a method being applied where it plainly does not fit.
- Project Meeting and Workshop Facilitation — You can facilitate a difficult session, such as a re-plan after a major slip, and keep it on decisions rather than blame.
- Project Closure and Lessons Learned — You can close a project early when it no longer makes sense, and make sure its lessons change how the next project is planned.

Risk & Governance
- Project Risk and Issue Management — You can set the risk approach and risk appetite for projects across the organisation, and tell leadership which portfolio risks they are carrying.
- Cross-Project Dependency Mapping — You can set how dependencies are recorded and managed across the portfolio, and use them to decide the order in which projects start.
- Project Governance and Stage Gates — You can set the governance framework for all projects in the organisation, and keep it light enough that teams follow it instead of working around it.
- Supplier and Contractor Delivery Management — You can manage several suppliers whose work depends on each other, and settle disputes about who is responsible for a delay.
- Deliverable Acceptance and Sign-Off — You can set up acceptance for deliverables with several approvers or an external customer, so sign-off is not held hostage to unrelated issues.

Stakeholders & Teams
- Sponsor and Steering Committee Engagement — You can set how sponsors and steering committees work across the organisation, and coach senior sponsors who are not playing their role.
- Project Team Mobilisation — You can set how the organisation stands up new projects, so each one starts with the people, roles and tools it needs.
- Business Change and Adoption Planning — You can set how the organisation plans for business change on projects, and refuse to call a project a success when nobody uses its output.

Portfolio & PMO
- Benefits Realisation Management — You can set how benefits are defined, owned and tracked across the portfolio, and use the evidence to change which projects get funded next.
- Portfolio Prioritisation and Capacity Balancing — You can run portfolio prioritisation for the organisation, tie it to strategy and capacity, and hold the line when a stopped project's sponsor pushes back.
- PMO Standards and Tooling — You can set the methods, templates and tools the whole organisation uses, and retire standards that add paperwork without improving delivery.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organised and followed up across the organisation, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and the way you estimate becomes what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders send problems with no owner to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole kind of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create clearly improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Project Management Professional (PMP) (required from Senior Project Manager)