The Organic PMO (Project Management Office) was established in October 2020 to formalise our approach to project management across all services in the business. 

Not many agencies choose to have a PMO, but we felt that centralising our project management expertise and clearly separating Strategic Account Direction and Project Management would lead to better results for our clients and the team. So far, we’re achieving that goal. 

The PMO’s flexible approach to work around time constraints and people has ensured everyone is fully briefed and engaged on the journey.

Organic’s projects managers are absolutely core to what helps us drive our projects forward on a global scale.”

Clare Levy, Head of Marketing, Henry Schein One, UK, Ireland, Asia and Pacific.

Over the last year or so we’ve grown the team, continuing to develop and define what the PMO brings to Organic. Through that, we’ve learnt a few key lessons – more on these later. 

What does the PMO at Organic do? 

The PMO sits at the heart of the agency and has a bird’s-eye view of the work that’s going on internally, and most importantly for our clients. Our Project Management Office:

• Provides project management and delivery expertise across the agency and ensures the smooth, timely and successful delivery of client work.
• Establishes processes, techniques and standards to improve overall project success and ensure we are always delivering the best work for our clients. 
• Tracks individual and team utilisation and forecasts when we may need to reach out to our network of experts for extra support. 
• Has full visibility of the status of current and potential future work. 
• Gets disproportionately excited about new PM tools and generally anything super organised. 

Within our team, we have qualifications ranging from PRINCE2 and ScrumMaster to AgilePM. We also have experience supporting large corporates, startups and charities. That allows us to make recommendations about the best way to run each individual project or retainer. 

In our first 15 months, we’ve implemented a robust and tailored scrum framework for Sainsbury’s and developed custom onboarding procedures for paid media clients. We’ve also created a hybrid approach that allows incremental delivery of large design and build projects with collaborative cross-functional teams.

Organic’s PMO sets us apart as an agency – our highly skilled and experienced PMs work with clients as consultants, not just as the project manager delivering a new website or a paid media campaign. As part of our consultancy offering, we help clients transform their ways of working, internal processes and team structure. Often, helping across these areas contributes just as much to the success of a project.

What have we learnt so far as a PMO? 

1. Be adaptable – A PMO in a large corporate is very different to the one we have here at Organic, and so it should be! There’s no one size fits all. With that in mind, we’re constantly evolving our approaches and processes, gathering feedback, holding retrospectives and trying new ways of working. If something doesn’t add value for our clients or enable the business to make better decisions,  we won’t do it. 
2. Full visibility – When new work lands, having a team with complete visibility of capacity is critical to ensuring the smooth running of the agency. At Organic, the PMO has this and can help management make informed decisions.
3. Keep the people team close – A project will fail if you don’t have the right team, so the PMO needs a close link to the team managing recruitment. At Organic, we’ve spent years building a network of experts, but sometimes we need to find someone new with a specific skill set.
4. Never compromise on project onboarding – No matter how big or small the project is, it should always start with strategic and operational onboarding where we make sure everyone is aligned, aware of the role they play and timeframes. 
5. Escalate early – Our project managers are realists. Good project managers hold all the necessary information to tell you if a project is on track. They have project plans, risk registers, a detailed view of the budget and a well-honed instinct developed over many years of experience. The PMO needs a direct line to senior management to escalate risks and issues quickly. If that’s well-established, potential problems can be prevented before they even occur. 

If you have a challenging digital project in the pipeline or want to improve your teams’ workflows, get in touch for more information on our PMO consultancy services – we’d love to help.