Are PMOs really that momentous for public authorities?

Authors

Siw Lundqvist, Linnaeus UniversityFollow

Abstract

Project management offices (PMOs) are frequently referred to as necessary, or even indispensable, for carrying out projects in multi-project settings, which often occur in public authorities’ IT-projects; particularly in times of today’s sweeping digitalization. Hence, this research studied Swedish public authorities and their IT departments’ use of PMOs; a survey was directed to IT project managers. Findings showed that even though PMOs are commonly described as significant, those that applied PMOs were fewer than those that did not. This research searched for correlations between the existence of PMOs and 88 variables that resulted in relatively few, mostly weak correlations. A hypothesis test did not show significant association between PMOs’ usage and project models’ usage. The research contributions are principally that PMOs do not appear to be that significant after all for Swedish public authorities, and to have reasonable expectations on PMOs. For practice, the implications foremost concern the importance of understanding conceivable pros and cons.

Recommended Citation

Lundqvist, Siw (2017) "Are PMOs really that momentous for public authorities?," International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management: Vol. 5: No. 3, Article 4.
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/ijispm/vol5/iss3/4