Symptoms of Ineffective Governance occurs in both IT Governance and PMO organizations. How are they similar in both, and how are they different?

Having an effective governance in IT Governance and Project Management Office (PMO) helps an organization to get the right people to make decisions and improve performance. Both of them have a two-way nature of their functions: IT – Business and PMO – Business. Assessment of the competency, capability and maturity for both governances would demonstrate signs of inefficiency.
Symptoms of ineffective governance are usually listed as follows, first, IT Governance, and then PMO, if there are similarities.

• Senior management senses low value from IT investments.

In situations like this, there is confusion regarding how IT decisions will be made and who will make them, and there is an inability for executive management to access information on the performance of IT investments. Similar to that in PMO, the symptom would be a perception that PMO is costly and useless.

• IT is often a barrier to implementing new strategies.

IT limits market opportunities for the business. IT becomes an order-taker and builds a separate application instead of being the platform for the company's strategic vision. Every application requires it's own infrastructure. Integration between different applications is missing. The implementation of new business initiatives is very slow and delayed in comparison with competitors due to the incapability of the infrastructure to provide the fast solution.

• Mechanisms to make IT decisions are slow or contradictory.

Problems in the decision-making process are often evidenced by circumvention of established rules for IT. One common manifestation of this problem in big organizations is when operating departments set up their own IT functions because centralized IT is perceived as unresponsive and/or ineffective. Decentralization may be a viable alternative,but organizations often jump to this solution rather than fix some of the underlying problems inherent in the existing IT decision-making or implementation processes. For PMO, some of the technical or business units do not address all the needs associated with an effective project management and devise their own methodologies and approaches.

• Senior management cannot explain IT governance.

Managerial incompetency in articulating and understanding IT Governance as a whole and as an enterprise architecture in particularly constrain business processes.
Senior management is not supporting a standard project management methodology and PMO policy.

• IT projects often run late and over budget.

Effective IT governance requires consistent project management, which is one of the main objectives of PMO. Ineffectiveness in IT projects that are shown either by running over budget or not on schedule, thereby raising issues in both PMO and IT Governance.

• Senior management sees outsourcing as a quick fix to IT problems.

If outsourcing is a result of frustration with IT, this is a strong symptom of IT Governance inefficiency. Looking for a fast fixes in IT due to lack of value is not a good problem-solving method in IT.

• Governance changes frequently.

If every change in business strategy or business processes causes a change in IT governance, this demonstrates that it is not effective. A significant organizational change will have impact on PMO, its structure and it's role within an organization. Likewise, successfully implementing or restructuring a PMO will inevitably have an impact on the organization. A co-evolutionary process is in play whereby PMO and the rest of the organization interact and evolve together. If this process is broken, it means PMO is low-performing.

Additionally, PMO weakness will be propagated by evidence of any of the following factors: cross-functional teams are not efficient and productive; stakeholders are not involved and are unaware of the expectations of the project; project management is not valued in the organization; there is lack of consensus regarding the value of the PMO to the organization; the organizational PMO maturity is not evolving.
The competency of personnel is a key issue for PMO performance. The inability to attract and retain competent people is a strong symptom of PMO inefficiency.

Resources:

• Peter Well and Jeanne W. Ross. (2004). IT Governance. How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press