PMO Service Catalogue Template - What Services Should Your PMO Offer?
If you're setting up a PMO, or perhaps you're revitalizing an existing PMO in an attempt to get executive buy-in and support, one of your core decisions is what "services" you should offer. This is not a simple decision, but it is absolutely key to delivering the value that your business wants.
And delivering value is how you build a high-impact PMO.
So... what services should you offer?
Service Catalogue Template
There is no such thing as the definitive service catalogue template that works for everyone. Every organization, and therefore every PMO, is different. You can buy very long and detailed service catalogues like this one by Stuart Dixon (I know Stuart and his work is great). It contains over 250 "services" that a PMO might provide.
But nobody is suggesting you try to provide 250 services! No, no, no, no...!
To help narrow things down, we have pulled together our list of the most common services that we see into our own PMO Service Catalogue Template. Don't view this as a "to do list". Think of it more as a short-cut to brainstorming the list yourself. It's not meant to be definitive - think of it as the PMO Services Greatest Hits, the songs you really want to hear when you see them live on stage.
You can download a copy here... but make sure to read on to the end of this blog because the real magic is not in the template, but in the process of deciding which services matter the most.
3 Service Categories
Roughly speaking, you can break PMO services up into three categories. Different people and organizations use different terminology, but these three categories keep coming up again and again. The three categories are;
1. Portfolio management
Laura Barnard of PMO Strategies includes portfolio prioritisation within the Strategy Definition stage. Future PMO / Wellingtone simply call it Strategy, but it's the set of services that allow you to capture demand, align your portfolio with business goals (prioritization), optimize your portfolio taking into account resources, create a clear portfolio roadmap (scheduling - avoid resource hot-spots) and more.
We like to call this "portfolio management". When the business struggles to decide what to fund or how to use scarce capacity, this can be one of the highest-value services a PMO provides.
Portfolio management helps leadership compare commitments against business priorities and resource constraints, decide what to fund, defer or change, and give delivery teams a more realistic basis for their work. Those are problems that extra project-level controls cannot solve on their own.
Portfolio management addresses the choices that shape the workload before delivery begins. Project delivery services, by contrast, help teams execute the commitments leadership has chosen to support. Both matter, but they solve different problems.
2. Project Delivery
This is where most PMOs spend their time - and we would argue that it's where they spend too much time. Whether you follow PMO Strategies and call this "Strategy Execution" or Future PMO and talk about "Delivery", what we all mean is "Services that help you actually execute the project".
This might include project reporting, administrative support, maintaining risk registers, doing compliance and assurance and more.
The goal here is to provide in-project services that help the project team deliver more efficiently. Complex projects and immature teams can often benefit from more support. Conversely, if your team of PMs has mastered the basics of project management, you might be able to ease back on these services.
3. Centre of Excellence
This is where you put in place all the supporting capabilities and infrastructure to support the other two pillars. This is home to PPM tools, knowledge management, PM training, exec sponsor training and more. It's where you develop / select methodologies - and boy, does this profession love methodologies!
The Future PMO team call this "Capability". Alexander David and the Value Matrix crew call it "Centre of Excellence". Whatever you call it, this is where you're putting in place all the "enabling capabilities" that help you build maturity and repeatability. It's about "embedding" good practice in the organization, if you like.
PMO Joe - Joe Pusz, inspirational founder of the PMO Squad - talks a lot about this stuff. He has even developed a whole capability model to assess how your organization has normalized and adopted project management. In this video, Joe talks about how to fuse strategy and execution and how to build that as a real capability in the business.
What services should my PMO provide?
To answer this, start with a simple question: "What business problem is the PMO here to solve?" For one organization that might be competing priorities and scarce capacity; for another, unreliable delivery, weak sponsorship or benefits that never materialize.
That purpose, not a generic checklist, should determine the services you offer.
At TransparentChoice, we're big fans of Laura Barnard's approach to this question. In her book, IMPACT Engine, Laura talks about a structured process to assess which services you should focus on first. In summary, you should:
- Ask your leadership team what "pain points" they have
- For the top few, do root cause analysis of why the pain occurs (treat the root cause not the symptom)
- Choose a small number of services that address the root causes you identify, and deliver those first
- Use focused 90-day cycles to make progress on a priority problem, show what changed and decide what to address next
You can read more on this approach in our Ultimate Guide to the PMO.
The benefit of this approach is that a) it's focused on solving the problems the business has, not on delivering some idealized list of services, b) it lets you prioritize and focus your efforts and c) it means you get to celebrate visible wins early.
This last point is really important as it's "celebrating the wins" that gets your leadership team to pay attention. The momentum this builds will give you the credibility and support to build the next service, and the next and so on...
The "project delivery" fallacy
Project delivery is where many PMOs feel most comfortable. But once the delivery basics are working, further investment in templates, controls and methods may produce diminishing returns if the real problems sit upstream. In a discussion about moving from project policing to strategic partnership, Alexander David and Stuart Easton explore how PMOs can build executive credibility by helping leadership make consequential portfolio choices.
Essentially, once you have the basics in place, you quickly get into the zone of diminishing returns. You can try harder and harder to execute projects well, to manage them better, but only make small incremental gains in performance.
One reason is that failure can begin before delivery does. Our article on why project managers cannot carry all the blame for project failure examines how problems can originate in strategy and project initiation, rather than only during execution. Resource overload is another problem that an individual project manager may not be able to resolve. When too many projects compete for the same people, excess work in progress can slow project flow. Deciding which work to support, pause or sequence is a portfolio-level responsibility.
Yet many executives - and remember, your executives are not project management experts - will assume that "Project Management" is the key to success. They encourage the PMO to focus on the "Project Delivery" services, wrongly believing that "project management" is the reason projects are going wrong.
When you do the root cause analysis we talked about in the previous section, you may find that the problems sit in Portfolio Management rather than Project Delivery. If they do, that is where you should build services first. The point is to invest PMO effort where it will address the business's most important problems, then revisit the choice as those problems change.
Review and adapt
This is important: the services you offer will, most likely, change over time.
Early on, for example, if you have a group of immature project managers, you might have to provide a lot of training, coaching and support services. You might have fairly rigid processes and templates to "keep them on the straight and narrow".
As your PMs mature, however, you can start to remove some of those templates and let the PMs use their judgement. This frees the PMO up to focus on the next service.
But less oversight only works when teams have the information and authority to make good decisions. In a discussion about bureaucracy and team autonomy, Michael Hannan uses two projects competing for the same specialist to show how visible schedule buffers can help teams coordinate directly rather than automatically escalating the conflict to a manager. The lesson for a PMO reviewing its services is to ask whether useful information could replace some of its approval and intervention work.
These tips will help you keep your services current:
- Interview your stakeholders. Ask what their biggest pain is and fix that.
- During those interviews, ask them which services you provide that don't add value... then kill those services
- Widely publicize the services you offer and ask for feedback
- Review the services you offer quarterly or, at worst, annually.
Conclusion
Having a long list of services can be useful inspiration. The key to building a high-impact PMO, however, is to choose the services that address the problems leadership cares about most.
Many PMOs invest further in project delivery when the problems limiting business value sit elsewhere, sometimes in Portfolio Management. Ask your leadership what "pain" they have, investigate the root causes, and use that diagnosis to decide which services deserve attention first.
Focus on one or two valuable services at a time, use short delivery cycles to demonstrate progress, and revise the catalogue as the business's needs change.
The test of a good catalogue isn't how many services you offer. It's whether those services are solving the problems your business actually needs solved.
💚 If you enjoyed this article, please consider following us. It’s a small gesture that means a lot to us and encourages us to keep sharing what we learn. See the ways to follow us below ↓