The High-Impact Pmo: How Agile Project Management Offices Deliver Value in a Complex World

That PMOs are paper tigers is simply not true as Philippe Husser, a long-time Strategic and Enterprise PMO, reveals.

Drawing on complexity sciences, strategic thinking, and human dynamics, Philippe tells real life stories of PMOs who delivered exceptional value to complex projects, programs, and portfolios in a VUCA world.

These stories give the readers exciting postures, methods, and tools that will make them become high-impact. They deliver much higher value than when limited to the widely promoted traditional approaches to project management.

In more than 100 engaging chapters, Philippe guides you through key capabilities to explore and learn that will make you navigate in the most complex environments. Coverage includes:

• Key characteristics of complexity
• Findings of complexity sciences
• Dealing with nonlinearities
• Transitions, bifurcations, and avalanches
• The four phases of a thermodynamic cycle applied to projects
• Complex systems and unpredictability
• Power laws and tail effects
• Why time seems to accelerate
• The optimum is between planning and agility
• Direct and indirect strategies
• Multimodal strategies
• Serendipity in projects
• From projects to strategic initiative portfolios
• Why people need great causes
• PMOs and the Procrustean bias
• Challenger and coach
• The buddy system
• The PMO spans of control
• Bridge cultural gaps
• Technology as a source of power
• Network analysis and strategy of alliance
• Paths to tipping points
• From junior PMO roles to an Enterprise PMO
• A community of decentralized PMOs
• A wide range of solutions