The International Project Management Officer (IPMO)® certification is the most important industry-recognized series of credentials for project management officers and professionals working in, or associated with, PMO activities and related services.

The foundation-level certification is aimed at PMO team members, project team members, and all stakeholders within the first year or two of their involvement in project environments.

The course explains the foundational knowledge to understand how PMOs add business value to delivery of projects within programs and portfolios.

The knowledge gained in the course will help you build skills from your existing and future workplace experience to become an increasingly competent PMO team member.

By the end of the course, participants will have demonstrated use of the steps and techniques to design, establish, and deliver PMO services. Certified IPMO Foundation members have demonstrated, through a combination of formal training and exam-based knowledge assessment, that they are able to contribute to the successful operation of a PMO in any organization.

Insights covered in the course materials are being collated to form AIPMO’s upcoming AIPMO Body of Knowledge. The AIPMO BoK will comprise several books that each address a particular aspect of the elements of a successful PMO. Course graduates will have a head start in understanding and using the framework of capabilities and linked techniques and tools.

To stand out as an excellent PMO professional, you need to know what is of greatest value to each unique project. Capability is gained from experiencing projects firsthand but is hugely accelerated by prior explanation of how the complex factors that exist in all organizations affect the projects, their stakeholders, and project controls.

This course immerses you in the world of PMO service delivery and the worlds of project control over product development lifecycles. By using the course’s case study, you will see and practice the implications of your PMO’s actions on project success, team morale, and business results.

The use of the case study makes this course hands-on. Attendees work on the day-to-day operational aspects of PMOs by meeting the challenges to improve the running, monitoring, and controlling of a PMO using PMO best practices.

Both certification courses follow a similar structure utilizing the PMO lifecycle framework and the PMO services framework. The foundation course provides a strong introduction to the nature of project-based work and introduces the project and program lifecycle and some common methods. These are assumed knowledge in the practitioner course.

The foundation certification course focuses more on the day-to-day activities of a PMO analyst using the PMO lifecycle services framework. The course covers in detail the role of a PMO team member or a project team member in the processes of designing one or more PMO services, then running, monitoring, and controlling PMO services. The practitioner certification course covers both the PMO lifecycle framework for PMO creation and transition from business need, identify, evaluate and strategize, design, justification, as well as run, monitor, and control the PMO Services and Capabilities, but more specifically as required by a PMO manager creating a PMO then running the PMO and team. The practitioner course requires more extensive PMO and project management experience.

For information: AIPMO courses span Foundation, Practitioner, Expert, Masters, and Doctors (via the Swiss Business School). Expert and above are targeted at the PMO director, consultant, or professional responsible for designing, running, and/or resolving issues in the areas of enterprise project/program management across a collection of PMOs at departmental levels.

This is the most comprehensive PMO certification suite in the world. Graduates of the Expert and higher courses understand the problems and potential of PMOs in an enterprise-wide context. Participants are expected to take their own organization’s needs through the steps of developing PMO structures (entities, local, and shared services), which they then take back to implement in their organization.