Hello PMO Mastery community,
I want to start a discussion about something I rarely see talked about in PMO literature: the specific challenges of building and running a PMO in an African organisational context.
I am based in Lagos and I manage the PMO for a mid-size financial services group with subsidiaries in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. Many of the frameworks we read about assume certain things like stable resourcing, mature governance structures, reliable digital infrastructure, that are simply not always the reality here.
Some specific challenges I face regularly:
- High staff turnover means institutional knowledge is constantly walking out the door
- Stakeholder engagement is very relationship-based; formal processes are often seen as obstacles rather than enablers
- Connectivity issues mean cloud-based PPM tools are sometimes not practical in certain locations
I would love to hear from others in similar contexts, or from those in other regions who have found ways to make frameworks more adaptable to local realities. What have you done to make your PMO fit the culture rather then the other way around?
Oluwaseun, thank you for opening this discussion. I work for an international consultancy and I have spent time in Lagos, Nairobi and Accra on different PMO engagements over the past few years. What you describe about the relational dimension is something I see consistently.
One thing I noticed is that in many of the organisations I worked with, formal project governance existed but was treated as a parallel process to how things actually got decided. The real decisions were made in conversations, often before any official meeting. The PMO that tried to own the formal process without understanding or connecting to the informal one was always struggling.
In my experience, the PMOs that thrived were the ones that had a person (or people) with deep trust inside the organisation, not just technical skills. I have seen very competent PMO professionals fail in West African organisations simply because they were seen as outsiders enforcing rules. And I have seen less technically sophisticated PMOs perform very well because their lead had credibility with the right people.
Curious whether this matches your experience or if your context is different.
The parallel process observation in the second reply is something I see described across different regions, but it does seem to show up more acutely in environments where formal governance was adopted quickly without the relationship infrastructure that makes it work elsewhere.
Oluwaseun, you mentioned high staff turnover as a specific challenge. How do you handle knowledge continuity in practice? That seems like the one where the standard PMO toolkit genuinely struggles.
From the PMO Leader we ran a African PMO conference in 2024. You can find the sessions on Youtube. I also noted a second edition coming on May 26 brought to you by Yellow Mind from Elyes Grar. See https://yellomind.com/events/apc/index.html