While many management teams focus on the selection of people, formalization of processes, and funding decisions as the starting points for a new PMO, one of the most fundamental decisions is often overlooked. The style of teamwork for the PMO affects all of these decisions and must be made early in the forming of a PMO.
Teams come in three basic teamwork styles, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. First is the Command and Control or Chain of Command style. There are more than a few throwbacks to this style active in businesses today, but it is largely abandoned in high-performance organizations.Second are teams in the Hub and Spoke style. One person is the Hub and provides team leadership but unlike the chain of command style, they are very much in touch with all of the team members and all that is going on with the project. The team members are the Spokes. This is a great model for small projects, but as it scales up, the Hub gets overloaded and eventually this style breaks down or evolves to the next style.
The third team style is Internetworked. The Hub and Spoke team grows and new cooperative and synergistic Hubs evolve. The team self organizes into a collection of Hubs with sometimes shared and sometimes uniquely connected Spokes. This style sometimes looks chaotic, but is without peer for creative and complex challenges. I call this Internetworked because the drawing of how these teams work may be compared to a map showing how web pages are interconnected on the Internet. While the Internetworked style may appear somewhat random, it is resilient, information access friendly, dynamic, and adaptable to meets the needs that are at hand - just like the Internet.
So with those models in mind, let’s look at building a PMO.
Read more at: http://www.chiefprojectofficer.com/article/153