PMO Symposium 2018 brought 600+ executives, PMO leaders and decision makers together for 4 days of executive level sessions, cutting edge keynotes from global experts, interactive workshops and a sponsor lounge that featured today’s innovative software solutions and services providers for project management offices.

The theme for this year’s PMO Symposium was “Where Leaders Meet.” This couldn’t be more true of the event this year and the value that attendees and presenters gained. With an event like PMO Symposium, project management professionals were able to network with people “just like them.”

With a focus on mastering value delivery, keynote speakers and break out session presenters concentrated on providing insights to build a resilient PMO and give practice approaches to harnessing disruptive forces that shape a business.

PMO leaders from many different markets and industries recognized and discussed many similar challenges with unique ways of looking at situations. Common themes of challenges included:

• Overall visibility of PMOs
• Prioritizing the right projects
• Using disperate tools to track projects
• Lack of strategic vision within the PMO

KeyedIn presented a breakout session on how to “Drive More Value From Your PMO.” The presentation talked about the reality of many PMOs today - which is a combination of disconnected tools and processes and the common pains as a result of those gaps. As a project and portfolio management (PPM) software vendor, we understand these pains and many of our customers used to experience these types of headaches as well.

Common pains of the project management office include:

• Without comprehensive portfolio analysis, determining the optimal selection and sequence of projects is nearly impossible.
• We don’t have a single source of truth for the status and progress of our projects.
• Resource management by spreadsheet means we have no real-time visibility into resource allocation or utilization.
• Our process for capacity planning is inconsistent and filled with a lot of guesswork.
• Ease of use and adoption is difficult to achieve.

Where you can drive more value is by eliminating those gaps and improving processes to standardize your PMO and increase the overall visibility of the portfolio. Without this visibility, it’s extremely difficult to adjust to changing demands, prioritize the most valuable projects, or successfully allocate the right resources to the right projects at the right time.

The PMO Symposium offered KeyedIn and all attendees the opportunity to discuss the latest challenges and trends in the industry and offer a solution to overcome those pains with a tool like KeyedIn. Check out our demo media center to see how our tool can help drive more value from your PMO.