Last year may have been unprecedented, but there’s one thing we saw coming: an accelerated pace of change.

While no one was expecting to have to become digital within just a few months (if not weeks), there were already signs that businesses needed transformations.

To start, changing customer expectations, mass digitization and newer, faster competition were already on almost everyone’s radar. Change is becoming the new standard, forcing organizations to rethink not only their business strategy but also how they transform to meet and deliver on that business strategy.

Bring on the EPMO

In fact, according to one study, 67 percent of business strategies don’t work because of a failure to enact end-to-end strategy execution. To avoid this fate, you need to realign, deliver and gain value from your company’s project portfolios. That means embracing enterprise program management (EPM) as a strategic business capability — one facilitated by agile portfolio, program and project management to execute the strategy from end-to-end and realize business value.

The first step in embracing EPM as a capability lies in evolving your project management office (PMO). Today’s PMOs need to be agile themselves, focused on business outcomes and the organization’s overall strategy. An evolved PMO will play a critical role in ensuring your company is ready for any change the world throws at it.

Imagining a New Project Management Office

Many of today’s companies face unclear business strategies, confusion over their overall objectives, and constrained support from senior executives. What most companies do know, however, is they’ll need more project managers to help as they:

• Take on more projects related to enhanced and emerging technologies, and
• Transition to operating models primarily focused on product-based work.

In fact — according to Gartner — 50 percent of large companies will have integrated their separate IT and business PMOs into enterprise program management office (EPMO) “hubs” to help facilitate business transformation.

As a result, PMOs must transform so they can drive new initiatives aligned to your company’s evolving business strategies. They must stop delivering control and start supporting everything from strategy and financial planning to business value realization.

The future of business is remote and digital – one where every interaction is smart, seamless and secure, every process is fully automated and paperless, and everyone can work from anywhere, anytime. That future is here, now.

As business leaders, your challenge is to improve current operations while transforming your organization to meet these new demands and evolving human behavior. The path forward is clear: It requires modernizing to a fully digital organization.

But, if you truly want your organization to do business anywhere, you must go beyond technology when adopting a digital-first approach. As a company that pioneered remote work over 20 years ago, we understand that firsthand.

Building on our remote work experience, we created a custom framework covering six interdependent components critical to digital-first success: customer experience, process, technology, information, structure and people. We call it “Business Anywhere.”