Role of a Portfolio, Programme and Project Office (P3O)

Background

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. The model deployed will depend on factors such as:

• The vision and goals of the organisation
• The mandate and sponsorship of senior management
• The programme/project delivery maturity of the organisation
• The skills and experience of the available resource pool
• The size and complexity of the organisation’s programme/project portfolio
• The political, organisational, and wider stakeholder environment

Once established, a P3O will mature over time and services provided should grow as staff skills and experience develops. A mature P3O should aim to provide support across the following areas:

• Governance – support for governance through scrutiny and challenge, maximising return on programme/project investment through oversight of delivery and risk
• Transparency – relevant, accurate and timely data and information (single-source) to support decision making
• Delivery support – helping programme and project SROs, managers and teams to do the right things and to do them in alignment with overarching policy and best practice
• Reusability – embedding best practice, establishing standards, sharing knowledge and lessons learned

P3Os in the NICS

The NICS has established a network of P3Os across the departments. The DoF P3O provides direction and hosts P3O knowledge sharing forums throughout the year with the rest of the NICS P3O Community.

This is an example of a ‘Hub and Spoke’ P3O implementation with a central ‘Hub’ and connected to the departmental P3O ‘spokes’. Each departmental spoke is in turn connected to individual programme or project management offices (PMOs) within its domain. Information and processes then flow along these connections.