PMOs have a tough job as they have to play both the roles of quarterback and air traffic controller in determining project priority, when work can begin, where to allocate resources, and reporting on the team and department’s work. They are the go-to person to ensure project charters capture all requirements and impacts to the business before they’re approved to begin work.
As work commences, PMOs must monitor and mitigate risks before they knock projects off course. Above all, it’s imperative they know exactly where projects stand and are able to give a comprehensive progress report on all progress at a moment’s notice.
Similar to football, where a quarterback is only as good as his receivers, the same analogy applies to PMOs — you’re only as effective as the tools at your disposal. You need to connect strategy, planning, and execution, whether you operate within an Agile or Waterfall methodology.
For too long, PMOs have relied on portfolio project management (PPM) tools to get by, but unfortunately, these only offer investment planning and portfolio management, financial planning, cost analysis, and maybe timelines. Traditional PPM setups don’t connect with project execution and collaboration. This is where Wrike shines, offering a combined CWM for PMOs, so they can do it all in one platform and connect strategy to execution to results.
This eBook is divided into nine sections, comprising 21 use cases of how PMOs rely on Wrike to connect planning to execution and strategic impact.
What’s in the eBook
Inside the eBook, you’ll learn:
- The nine key areas in which PMOs rely on Wrike to get work done
- The 21 use cases Wrike is uniquely equipped to solve
- Visual examples of how Wrike enables PMOs to strategize, plan, and execute their work
Wrike features that PMOs can use immediately
- Dynamic request forms: Trigger a pre-planned project from these automated intake forms and route the work request to the appropriate teammate. Customize each form so that you collect all the details upfront and start work immediately.
- Blueprints: These are especially useful for recurring work as they allow you to quickly create tasks, folders, or projects with attributes you’ve already specified. Create a Blueprint from scratch, save existing work as a Blueprint, or launch new work using a Blueprint you’ve saved.
- Resource management: With Wrike’s Workload view, project managers get full visibility into each team member’s schedule and workload, can adjust timelines, and reassign work as necessary to accommodate urgent requests or changing priorities.
- @mention functionality: Just like Slack and social media channels, Wrike’s @mention functionality lets you tag stakeholders as needed to request their feedback or inform them of project updates. Anytime you tag someone, they receive automated notifications in Wrike and email.
- Shareable dashboards: Get a detailed overview of work progress at an individual, team, and department level instantly. All stakeholders can track work progress in real time, visualize deadlines, and reprioritize as necessary.
- Critical path: In Gantt charts, focus on tasks that are crucial to completing a project and tasks that can cause work to fall behind. Via the Timeline, all tasks that are part of the critical path turn red, and those that don’t remain their original color.
- Project scorecard: With budgeting in Wrike, program managers can add custom fields to track budget spend for their entire program while also sharing real-time updates with their team and highlighting key milestones and KPIs.
- Work breakdown structure: Make large projects more manageable by breaking them down into smaller items, such as folders, subfolders, tasks, and subtasks, while organizing everything into programs that roll up into portfolios.
- RAID logs and project risk report: Identify and score potential risks based on severity during planning so that they can be mitigated along the way. PMOs can track and resolve these risks using the risk management dashboard. Finally, project managers can monitor risks from start to finish with Wrike’s weekly automated project risk report.
- Time tracking: Track resource spending against planned budgets in near real-time and lock time entries after approval, whether you prefer weekly, monthly, or a specified interval. If you forget to set a timer, you can even add time retroactively with a few clicks.
- Cross-tagging: Give full transparency to everyone into work items (those who need it) so they can track projects amongst their workflows. Cross-tag tasks, subtasks, folders, milestones, entire projects, and more. No other CWM can match Wrike’s cross-tagging functionality.
Get all the PMO use cases here
There are 21 great reasons why PMOs at Siemens, Walmart Canada, and Ogilvy trust Wrike — it’s the most robust CWM solution to help them connect strategy, execution, and results. Get the specifics by downloading the use case eBook here.
