What is an ePMO?

An Enterprise Program Management Office, or ePMO, is an entity charged with management of one or more programs and portfolio of systems or perhaps specifically with the integration of those systems. The ePMO concept or title began appearing in print about 5 years ago, but despite the amount of time that's passed since then, the practice of ePMOs haven't progresses much beyond the original PMO paradigms.

In other words, the ePMO has yet to be fully realized but for a few exceptions. The obvious question is why isn't this occurring more rapidly? Some might feel that the charter for an ePMO is beyond the scope of what most PMOs are charged to accomplished. It might be considered dangerous or out of scope to try to plan for ore manage relationships and interactions that occur around the PMO rather than within it.

The problem with this thinking though, is that nearly every IT focused PMO is now expected to integrate within the larger context of their enterprise. Even non-IT PMOs feel the pressure for increased oversight and accountability and all PMOs share one characteristic in common - complexity.

The complexity that must be managed in order to successfully execute a program is perhaps the single greatest challenge facing leadership today. The advantage with an ePMO that is designed to be an enterprise PMO from the ground up is that complexity is tackled directly, with mitigation built into a set of fused processes...



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