A PMO professional uses a project portfolio performance dashboard designed using PMO standard metrics.

In governance and performance reporting, the PMO must maintain standard metrics to ensure consistency, comparability, and alignment across the portfolio. However, a successful PMO also recognizes the unique needs of individual teams and projects, balancing standardization with flexibility. The PMI-PMOCP framework emphasizes that PMOs should work collaboratively with project teams to understand their specific requirements and challenges.

By understanding the gaps between the PMO standard metrics and the lab team’s metrics, the PMO professional can adapt data collection methods to include both standard and team-specific metrics. This approach ensures that key portfolio-wide data remains consistent for leadership while allowing the lab team to track and report on metrics that directly support their work and add meaningful insight. Such an adaptive approach increases stakeholder engagement, improves data quality, and promotes transparency.

Simply enforcing rigid standards (option B) or ignoring PMO metrics (option C) risks losing valuable oversight or data consistency. Meanwhile, redesigning the entire dashboard (option D) without a needs analysis may lead to unnecessary complexity. PMI-PMOCP guidelines advocate for a collaborative, value-driven approach in metric standardization and customization.