The journey towards a seat in the PMO

How do individuals find their way to working in a PMO? That is the question Lizabeth Bohler and Mike Hooper sought to answer. Here’s what they discovered.

The APM PMO Special Interest Group (SIG) wanted to discover how people discover a career in project, programme or portfolio management offices (PMOs). We felt this knowledge would be an important contribution to the continued professionalisation of the PMO industry. Should we be offering PMO roles to people with experience or transferable skills? When is best to deliver PMO skills – at higher, further or work-based education? To investigate this, we designed a poll sent out to PMO professionals on the APM website, LinkedIn and Twitter. Our poll asked, “How did you get into PMO?”, with these possible options:

I was a project/programme manager
straight from education
I had a career change
other

You can see the results of our LinkedIn poll above. Our initial conclusions from our poll and interviews are that:

The majority of PMO professionals have had a career change or have experience as a project and/or programme manager. This strongly suggests that PMO roles are not the obvious route when starting out in the change industry.
As 36% of respondents have had a career change, there is a large need for fundamental PMO education, and therefore PMO SIGs need to offer lots of best practice advice and safe spaces for people to ask questions.
As 33% of respondents have been a project and/or programme manager, going into a PMO role is seen as a natural career progression, and we need to find out why people move on, whether that’s for work-life balance, salary progression or to become a mentor.

From 88 respondents, we looked into those who answered ‘other’ and chose two for interview to gain additional insight. The PMO journeys of Fatimah Abbouchi, Australia’s first PMO Influencer of the Year, and Jo Candlish, Head of PMO at Metro Bank, are presented here.

Fatimah Abbouchi

Australia’s first PMO Influencer of the Year

Q What was your first job and when?

I graduated from secondary college early at the age of 17, unsure of what to do and without comprehension of the words ‘project’ or ‘PMO’. All I knew was that I liked to help people be organised. I went into a global manufacturing company of 55,000 employees undertaking an administration traineeship. I finished that early too! The company offered me an IT administration assistant role in a department of 55 people. That’s where my career started.

Q When did you discover the concept of PMO?

The manufacturing company was implementing SAP and an opportunity arose for me to become the right-hand person to the Programme Director. I didn’t know what a programme was, or what a programme director did, but I started to understand that the skills I was performing in my role were being referred to as ‘PMO’. I would hear things like, “Fatimah is doing our PMO.” I assumed that meant doing my previous IT role in a project environment.

After two SAP implementations, I was a bit sad when it all finished, and I looked up ‘admin’ and ‘programme’ roles. The first opportunity that I found was a role as a project administrator, and that was my second job after college.

Q What was your first PMO role and when?

After three years at the manufacturing company, it was time to move on. Although the role I found was advertised as ‘project administrator’, I soon realised, when in post, that it was a programme. And for many years since, the ‘P’ in PMO has stood for programme for me. This became my first PMO role. I was thrust into an AU$800m government programme at a utilities company. They had a Programme Manager who was struggling to get project status updates and he asked me to build a PMO to enable this. Over the next 12 months, I built this function and that was my first PMO. I was 21 at the time and I became keen to stay in the change profession, as I enjoyed helping the teams that were delivering to figure out challenges and organise activities.

Q What is your role now?

Over 20 years, I’ve worked in over 19 industries. I discovered that I like governance and the pillars of it, structure, order and managing information. Around 2016, I had worked on a very successful programme where I had set up a global PMO overseeing delivery across 16 countries. It was a fun and stressful experience, but I had figured out a way of integrating strategy with C-suite, delivery and operations. I documented this way of working and have set up a company that delivers this to organisations as the ‘Agile Management Office (AMO) Way’. My company has a staff of 10, helping organisations in Australia and the US to roll out AMO as a way of working to become successful in change delivery.

Q What is agile for your company?

To us there is the small ‘a’, the behaviours and mindset of agile, and there is the big ‘A’, which is the Agile Manifesto, the method and the tools of agile. We believe that if you don’t have both, companies won’t achieve the agile way. When setting up an AMO, it’s about creating an agile function running all the way through from strategy, delivery and operations, so change is fast.

Q What would that 17-year-old say if she met you today?

I don’t think she’d believe it to be honest! When I was that age, I didn’t get into university, which is why I went into the traineeship. I had to learn skills by working and absorbing everything I could from those around me. That’s the same with business – be adaptable and agile to figure out solutions to problems, and fast!

Jo Candlish, Head of PMO, Metro Bank

Q What was your first job and when?

I did a number of jobs when I left school, things like waitressing, working in hotels, but I went to university (to study economics and history) a little bit later than everybody else and my first job out of university was working for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). I went in partially as an economist, partially as a Welsh speaker. I worked with Welsh farmers around cattle subsidies and cattle tracing. I started off, believe it or not, making paper passports for every single cow in the UK!

Q When did you discover the concept of a PMO and what was your first PMO role and when?

I discovered the concept of a PMO after I started being one, which is slightly embarrassing, but I always share it with people! I moved on from Defra and I went to work for a start-up bank of about 500 people. I was recruited by the CIO as his assistant, and what he actually needed was somebody to coordinate bringing together technology, data and change, which I started doing. And at some point, the Head of Change sat me down and said, “in this PMO role that you’re doing…”. I wrote down ‘PMO’ and later Googled it. I found out afterwards that the CIO couldn’t get funding for a PMO, so he hired an assistant. He didn’t ever say, “please be a PMO”. I learned from the Head of Change, and realised PMO was a thing. I discovered I could stop making it up on my own and I could actually learn from other people who already did it. That was my first introduction to PMO, slightly by stealth!

Q Was introducing a PMO made easier because you started doing the job and sharing results before formalising your PMO?

It hugely helped and it was a stealth move to bring someone in. It was because the Head of Change recognised the value of having PMO coordination and so was already a champion of it. Coming in, asking the dumb questions and making sensible decisions was very fertile ground. It was easy to have quick wins in terms of efficiencies and repeatable processes where people didn’t think, ‘Oh no, we’re being hampered by governance’.

Q What is your role now?

I moved on to work for Metro Bank two-and-a-half years ago as Head of PMO. Metro Bank has been around for 12 years; it’s the first new high‑street bank for over 100 years. There is quite a developed change department and it had a huge amount of investment activity going on when I joined, partly because there’s a big regulatory burden on financial institutions. We have moved from waterfall projects and agile projects operating together in a hybrid framework to rolling out an enterprise ‘value stream’ model. My role is to amalgamate change in this model, implementing lean portfolio management. We’re changing how we do change transformation.

Q What would that 18-year-old say if she met you today?

She’d be very surprised. I grew up in a small Welsh village, went to a Welsh‑speaking school and started off waitressing in hotels. I had no idea where I would end up. I live in the South‑East of England now, because I came where the jobs are, but that’s not what I would have recognised or expected or a role I even knew existed. But it’s been an interesting journey.

Lizabeth Bohler MAPM is a Portfolio Consultant and experienced Portfolio Director with a proven track record of leading diverse teams. She has successfully delivered high‑risk change portfolios, worth up to £25m, in both the private and public sectors. Mike Hooper ChPP is a Principal Consultant at Atkins who currently leads a PMO delivering engineering services to the MOD. He has over 20 years’ experience of delivering engineering projects, programmes and portfolios in the defence sector.

Check out our recent PMO-focused APM Podcast episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more: