Marketing Project Management Office Roadmap to Success

Many organizations have established PMOs in their information technology (IT) departments with varying degrees of success. Marketing Departments can also benefit from establishing a PMO. How does the marketing PMO differ from the IT PMO? In many ways they do not. However, there are key considerations to be addressed when starting a marketing PMO that are unique to the needs of the marketing department.

There are many reasons for establishing a PMO in the marketing department. Some of the biggest reasons are the fact that marketing budgets can represent a significant percentage of an organization's overall budget. In many organizations marketing content requires senior executive alignment prior to releasing to the public. Marketing projects potentially require complex coordination between multiple agencies and across consumer communication channels. The aforementioned characteristics make marketing a logical candidate for a PMO.

Establishing a marketing PMO provides a special set of challenges. How one manages the challenges will affect the success of the PMO in the marketing department. Developing a marketing PMO will require a slightly different approach from the IT PMO. There are a number of potential roadblocks that can be avoided with a well thought out approach.

In my experience, although there are often many challenges to overcome, the most common roadblocks to establishing a marketing PMO are unrealistic stakeholder expectations, resistance to change, and lack of understanding how to properly use the PMO

• Unrealistic stakeholder expectations.

  It is important to understand the baseline expectations of the various stakeholders at the very beginning. Most often, I have found that the baseline expectations can vary widely from one individual stakeholder to the next. Once the baseline expectations are known, it is important to establish realistic expectations and obtain the stakeholder alignment to a new set of expectations using the proper mix of consensus building techniques.

• Resistance to change.

  Each organization will vary in both willingness and ability to adapt to new or modified processes. Apply the proper organizational change leadership steps to overcome an organization's resistance to change. Demonstrating real benefits will lessen the resistance.

• Understanding how to properly use the PMO.

  Once the marketing PMO has been approved and begins to become established, the education process begins. In many ways, the PMO has to market to the marketers to establish, formalize and maintain the marketing PMO. As part of the internal marketing process, the PMO must educate the marketing staff about the PMO, how the PMO operates, and how to engage with the PMO for maximum benefit.

The marketing PMO can add significant value and improve marketing results in many ways. By following a few guidelines and establishing maturity goals for the PMO that evolve over time is the best route to success in establishing a marketing PMO. Some of the guidelines for establishing the marketing PMO roadmap include:

• Provide just enough process to maintain financial and status visibility to organizational leadership through the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and above
• Establish a communications process to enhance coordination of on-brand messaging across marketing channels for consistent impactful marketing that motivates clients and consumers to purchase goods and services
• Enable enough flexibility in the project management process to adapt to our the needs of the marketing stakeholders
• Avoid becoming too rigid to enable the marketing department to quickly change directions and plans to address the messaging needs to attract clients

I have found that following these guidelines to build the roadmap for establishing the marketing PMO will lessen or even remove some of the potential roadblocks to success. Initially it also helps if project managers within the PMO can align with marketing staff that understands the need and is open to trying a new approach that will allow them to focus more on the creative process. Focusing the marketing team on the business of marketing and less on project management enables the teams using the PMO to experience many of the following benefits:

• Raising senior management's confidence in the solution.

  By improving coordination and communication across departments within marketing by following proven project management techniques, the entire team will operate with a unified vision. Senior leadership will recognize the value of collaboration.

• Enhancing marketing performance.

  I have witnessed situations where after the PMO was established, the marketing team was able to reverse declining sales and generate significant growth by improving the cross channel communication and consistency of consumer oriented messaging.

• Improving timeliness of deliverables.

  Developing realistic timelines, with clear identification of milestones and dependencies will improve marketing's track record for delivering marketing content timed to maximize the consumer impact. The PMO provides planning to enable the highest quality materials by avoiding the inefficiencies and lower quality of a last minute scramble. I have encountered situations where important opportunities to connect with the consumer were missed, or met with lackluster content due to lapses in the planning process.

• Building consensus.

  Coordinating multiple related or dependant activities will provide a forum for all stakeholders to contribute. A key part of the coordination is informing stakeholders of current direction as ideas transform into on-brand, marketing content and effective in-market execution.

When establishing a marketing PMO, one needs to remember that the PMO is a continuing journey, not a final destination. Every journey begins with the first step. Developing and following the roadmap for establishing the marketing PMO will help make sure, the marketing PMO starts on the right foot.