All about IT Governance

I can’t imagine a company without a PMO however, a PMO with lots of project managers can intervene in achieve annual goals.

What do you mean?

I view PMO as the platform for delivering projects - a company without such a platform (of discussion, planning, budgeting, allocating etc.) is probably less successful.

 A company can have a mix of Run, Transform & grow objectives - typically set by Senior Management & Board. For example, a company trying to put itself on acquisition track would try to focus equally on ‘Run’ & ‘Transform’ projects and less on ‘Grow’ projects while a company in a highly competitive market would focus more on ‘Grow’ projects. A company which has acquired company (or companies) would focus more on Transform projects.

The PMO is a platform to take the company objectives of Run-Transform-Grow and helps balance the IT deliverables vs. IT Availabilty.

Bottomline PMO is mandatory department however, should there be lots of PM (Project Manager) in a company? How much is too much?

I do not believe, there should be lots of PM in a company - it has to be right sized to about 6 high risk, low impact or 3 medium risk, high impact projects per PM.  Having more PMs in an organization can get the organization culture muddled and can interfere in the execution of the projects.

Compliance is definitely an uninvited guest - it lingers in your day-to-day operations however, it can help you in these area:

a. Your strengths and weaknesses - gone are those days where you would informally run processes over phone/email which could lead to potential miscommunications and unintentional malpractices. You can identify which areas are formal and which areas are not and fix them.
b. Potential areas of automation: Access granting and terminations, workflows and dashboards
c. Streamline areas of service continuity - Think about it - did we streamline our processing starting from building software through delivering them to production  and managing them before? Probably not. Now, we are forced to.