Benchmarking the strategic roles of the project management office (PMO) when developing business ecosystems

Purpose Projects are an inherent part of implementing strategies. Still, the challenge is to connect a long-term strategy for larger ecosystem development to the individual projects being undertaken. The purpose of this paper is to test the ability of seven project management office (PMO) roles to achieve strategic planning in large society development public organisations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Design/methodology/approach The questionnaire survey that was employed for data collected from 450 project members in 19 project-based public organisations having PMO unit had a response rate of 60 per cent. The received data analysed quantitatively by using multiple regression. Findings The survey data revealed that PMO enhanced the achievement of the strategic plan for better development of the business ecosystem. The analysis outputs, as expected, have indicated that 95 per cent of the targeted organisations established their own PMO for developing business ecosystem. Research limitations/implications Despite there are PMOs hosted by private organisations, the study is limited to the PMO within the context of the government and semi-government organisations in the UAE. Practical implications These findings further utilised in developing the conceptual PMO model that would be flexible to be applied to similar project management methodology in various business settings, as well as pave the way for further scholarly investigations. Originality/value This work is both exploratory and causal study, which concentrates on investigating the effectiveness of seven proposed PMO roles (as independent variables) in carrying out the strategic plan (as the dependent variable) of the public-sector organisations in the UAE for the development of business ecosystem.