PMO Business Planning Template

This template is intended to help the PMO produce its annual business plan. Ultimately, your organization
likely has its own template that you need to comply with, but this template is intended to help with the
thought process and ensure that all of the key elements have been identified. It is inspired by the article
PMO Business Planning.

PMO Business Owners

In this section, you need to identify all of the business owners of the PMO. These are the organizational
leaders who are responsible for defining the role and priorities of the PMO. Put simply, these are the
people who need to answer the question “The PMO will be successful if it delivers...”

It is important to identify all of these--not just the person to whom the PMO reports--because it is this
group that will collectively identify the business priorities that will be addressed next. If not, everyone is
identified and then the danger is that the PMO will work to deliver the wrong priorities. On the flip side,
this should only be the people who truly have the ability to define those goals; others should be excluded.
Examples of the type of people that will fall in this category are the executive team, the PMO head’s direct
manager, the heads of client departments/divisions, etc.

Name Title Contributed to

priorities (Y/N)

Business-Driven Priorities
This section should contain the three to five (no more) priorities that are collectively agreed to be the
business owners above. These represent the PMO’s purpose for the next 12 months, and successful
delivery of all of these will define the PMO as successful. These priorities should be the basis for the
specific objectives and action plans that come next.

The priorities should be written as statements that include an objectively measurable goal. For example,
the statement should not be “improve the quality of project execution” (no indication of a success
measure), nor even “improve the quality of project execution by 5%” (no clear definition of what that
means). Instead, an appropriate priority would be “improve the quality of project execution by reducing
the total portfolio budget overrun by 5% and by reducing the average schedule delay by 5%.”

Wherever possible, all of the business owners should contribute to these priorities--and at the very least
they should approve them. The table in the section above includes a column to capture those owners who
participated in the process.
Priority Priority Statement
1
2
3
4
5

Objectives
The priority statements provided by the business owners are going to be high level and will need to be
broken out into a number of individual objectives that will collectively come together to deliver each of the
priorities. You are likely used to developing objectives, so this will be a relatively straightforward exercise.
Ensure that the objectives comply with the well-known SMART acronym:

 Specific (there should be no doubt or confusion over what the objective is)
 Measurable (you need to be able to easily determine whether the objective has been achieved)
 Agreed to (you can’t act in isolation as the PMO head; you need to ensure that team members
responsible for objectives agree to the commitment)
 Realistic (there has to be an expectation that the objective can be achieved)
 Time bound (the objective needs a deadline)

The objectives should be tied back to the one or more priorities that they support (add the priority number
to the right hand column in the table below). Objectives that do not support any of the priorities should not
be included.

Objective Objective Statement Priority (ies)

supported
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Action Plan
The final part of business planning is to develop the action plan to achieve the objectives. Just as we
need to build a project plan to deliver a successful project, we need to identify the work that needs to be
done, the people who need to do it and the deadlines for completion of the various work items that will
collectively deliver the objectives. At the business plan stage, this will likely be a high-level plan; but it is
important to complete this step as it will help to identify any additional resources that will be required to
complete the work--remember that the day-to-day business of the PMO still needs to be performed as
well.
I have not included a table for the action plan here as I assume that you will build the plan using your
organizations project management/PPM tool and insert it into this document. Each action item should
include:

 The objective that the task contributes to (using the objectives as top level deliverables in the plan
works well)
 Relationships/dependencies between tasks
 Task owner
 Effort and duration estimates
 Deadlines
 Milestones/Review checkpoints