How to Set Up a PMO

Community, 

I am a wrike newbie and certified PMP. Looking to get some advice on how you or your team has set up PMOs in the past. At my current job, there is no PMO and I've been tasked with setting one up and want to learn from the experts who have done this from scratch. 

How have you used Wrike in the process? etc. 

Thanks in advance for all your help and guidance. 

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Hi Lea!  Welcome to Wrike!  There are a ton of great guides to getting your PMO established.  Here's one from Wrike as well - https://www.wrike.com/project-management-guide/faq/how-to-start-a-project-management-office-pmo/

For us, we started in the beginning by determining our MVP (minimum viable product) - at a base level, what did we want to achieve/improve and focused on that as our primary launch goals.  Once we had aligned internally, we were able to set up goals, stakeholder requirements, and we fleshed our our full execution plan.  We used Wrike to standardize our process - what we called our "Office Roll out" plan, so as our Wrike account expanded to more offices and teams, they were able to use this as a guideline to establish their PMOs unique to their BUs.  Each step in the roll out plan, contained a breakout of tasks/milestones with detailed instructions in each step (such as "Groups & Teams" and identification of roles and access levels).  This made it very consumable by new teams, and allowed us to scale very rapidly.  

All in all - whatever you build, plan for training and building a knowledge base so that your team has access to the critical objectives/know-hows that you are including in your PMO plan, too!!    Best of luck and welcome aboard!

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My organization is too small to have a PMO, but we use Wrike to manage all of our Marketing projects. I think the important thing is to communicate how your organization will use Wrike. If everyone knows the workflow they can all help keep things organized. Best wishes!

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The most important thing is that you have your processes outside Wrike. Wrike is a tool which you can arrange as you want. First you need a project / organization structure outside and than fit Wrike to your needs.

If you have your outside structure fitting to your buiseness you can get a lot of help here and ideas how to costumize your Wrike for daily work (custom workflows, ressource management, document management, ......)

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Clarifying/defining the portfolio, program, and project-related governance is vital and then from there making mico-adjustments to make it succinct/robust.

My top suggestions:

  • Find the repeatable steps in the execution of projects (you can create tasks, then a blueprint for those tasks)
  • Reduce risk by utilizing common practice (you can utilize Wrike's Risk indicator) and set up quality assurance (perhaps reviews?)
  • Keep business strategy tied to the project-based execution of that strategy (Keep the end in mind!)

Sherrie Besecker posted a great Wrike resource too!

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The suggestions by Sherrie Besecker and Sean Wright are spot on.

We are actually going through a review of our set up. It is important to understand your workflow, the type of transparency you want to bring to the organization (and how Wrike supports transparency) and enabling our user base. The last part is multi-step process and we are reviewing how we can enable more, so think about what you want people to accomplish to determine the type of work that needs to be executed.

Good Luck Lea Labastida!

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Heather Hernandez Marketing is a huge component of our team. How have you been able to access the workload of each team member? Do you access by collateral? For example, how many brochures, emails, digital ads, etc. 

Would love any insight into your marketing process in wrike. Always looking to learn. 

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Sherrie Besecker Kevin Thalacker Sean Wright I am so grateful for all the information and resources provided. I will dive in. 

 

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Lea Labastida I am fairly new to my organization, but as far as I can tell we don't use Wrike to access workload. The work just keeps getting piled on!

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I have to agree with Sean - create a blueprint for your "standard" project, estimate and allocate effort, tweak as you go :)

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