Creating the PMO Intake Process

A Case Study

A few years ago we were asked to help a large nationally recognized nonprofit implement a Project Management Office for their organization that would jointly function under the CFO and the CIO.

The engagement was scheduled for 6 months and encompassed everything from starting up the PMO from scratch to making it fully operational and handing over a PMO Operations Guide to their internal management team.

For the purposes of this post, we’re focusing only on how we set up the project intake process. As you might imagine this was one of the first things we needed to establish and it helped facilitate our efforts to get a complete catalog of all the projects that were already in flight (some of which management was barely aware of). This was important because we planned to have ALL projects, even the ones inflight, submit a Project Intake Document and be reviewed and approved before adding them to our newly created project portfolio.

The Project Intake Document (PID) was developed with input from both members of management as well as the teams delivering the projects. The simple reason for this is we don’t want to ask people for information they don’t have or couldn’t reliably provide - which would ultimately result in them fighting against the process. Our PID was conceived of as a high-level input to the PMO Governance team who would then ask for additional information if needed.

Once we accepted all the PIDs, we asked the newly formed PMO Governance team to review them and apply an objectively developed scorecard against each of them so that the result was a forced-ranked view of our portfolio.

In subsequent weekly PMO Committee meetings these projects submitted full Project Charters and were activated if they received approval.