Discover how to design and implement a strategic project management office (SPMO) to support your organization's strategic objectives.

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Learn the wide range of proven approaches and emerging concepts for aligning engagements, programs, and projects with an organization's strategic objectives through a strategic project management office (SPMO). A strategic program management office (SPMO) enables the effective implementation of organizational strategy through engagements, portfolios, programs, and projects.

Part of the Stanford APM curriculum, this three-day elective course combines the latest research from Stanford with the world of practical strategy execution. This course provides proven techniques for creating SPMOs to support the achievement of your organization's strategic objectives. Students create an SPMO for each of three complex, global case studies during the course. On the final day, the class conducts an innovative simulation of various real-world scenarios for each of the case studies with real-time changes to the business environment.

Benefits to the Organization

As a result of The Strategic PMO: Projects to Enterprise, your organization will benefit from:

• A new understanding of the best ways to design and implement SPMOs for large, complex programs and projects
• Improved understanding of how SPMOs can enable strategy execution
• Senior managers being able to identify the best organizational structures for executing corporate strategies using engagements, programs, and projects
• Strengthened opportunities for faster and more effective development of new products and services

Learning Objectives

After attending The Strategic SPMO: Projects to Enterprise, you will be able to:

• Answer why an SPMO may be needed for complex programs and projects
• Define what an SPMO is and the activities it may perform that cannot be done as well elsewhere in the organization, especially as an agent of change
• Determine the best SPMO design, given your desired outcomes, demands, and needs, and how to best implement it
• Assess the political environment, identify forces that support (or thwart) effective SPMO operation, and navigate them successfully
• Provide, as needed, a consistent SPMO framework across the enterprise
• Determine how to leverage your SPMO practice for greater impact on the organization and its strategy
• Address typical real-world challenges in running an SPMO and apply practices learned during a reality dive simulation 

Target Audience

This course is designed for managers of program managers and project managers, program managers and managers of large projects, project office directors and staff, and functional managers. This course helps you recognize what is working and what else can be done to ensure that your SPMOs create value by enabling the achievement of your organization's strategic objectives.

Prerequisites. While this course has no prerequisites, participants will benefit most from the course if they have previously completed the Converting Strategy Into Action course from the Stanford APM curriculum. 

Course Topics

Rationale for an SPMO

• Operations vs. programs
• SPMO program activities and options matrices
• Why SPMOs are important and what their benefits are

Defining an SPMO

• Desired outcomes drive SPMO design and structure
• SPMO case study
• Strategic Execution Framework (SEF): it’s the environment: culture, structure, and strategy
• SPMO activities: process development and integration, tools and templates, team support, planning support, execution support, portfolio management support, training, intellectual capital management, metrics, coaching and mentoring, mastering methodology leadership

Implementing an SPMO

• SPMO implementation requires managing as a project
• Manage SPMO implementation as a project plan
• Success factors: sponsorship, selling, and funding the SPMO
• Organizational position, physical location, level of centralization
• SPMO scope of authority
• SPMO metrics
• Factors for SPMO team success, guides for virtual teams
• Leading and staffing the SPMO
• Sourcing SPMO activities
• What high-value SPMOs do: individual level, team level, organization level
• Options for the SPMO to provide program/project managers
• Invigorating problem programs/projects
• Options for communicating about the SPMO
• Using force field analysis to address challenges to SPMO success
• SPMO implementation checklist

SPMO Politics & Organizational Change

• Definitions of power and politics
• Assessing your environment
• Agreement on facts, goals, and approach (matrix tool)
• Centrality: connectedness, closeness, betweenness
• Types of power: legitimate, reward, expert, informational, coercive, referent, position power, person power
• Political/stakeholder analysis with power-interest matrix (PIM)
• Leading change: SPMO, neuroscience, and organizational change
• SPMO and organizational change decision matrix (traditionalist, adjuster, developer, revolutionary)
• Matrix for assessing SPMO change impacts
• SPMO and politics: checklist

Lessons Learned & Knowledge Brokering

• Cycle of knowledge creation
• Why sharing knowledge is important; why ideas don’t spread
• Types of knowledge brokers: problem-driven internal, solution-driven internal, or external brokers
• Knowledge brokering cycle
• Knowledge brokering and learning from failure; importance of culture; examples
• Knowledge brokering: checklist

High-performance SPMOs

• Cultivating: organizational impact, metrics-reuse, benchmarking
• Examples of SPMO reporting
• Integration issues: supplier, individual contractor
• Learn from lessons learned and reviews
• Maintain customer focus and sponsorship involvement

SPMO Reality Dive

• Reality dive simulation with real-world operational scenarios
• Final action plan and course review