ClickUp's Hierarchy lets you organize your PMO team's Workspace efficiently, reduce context switching, and find information quickly.
Below are Workspace Hierarchy best practices for PMO teams.
Organize your PMO Space
We recommend that everyone on the PMO team works in the same PMO Space. You can enable ClickApps to customize your Space, and also filter, sort, group, and save views for additional customization.
Organize your PMO Folders
Within the PMO Space, there are several types of Folders that your team may find helpful. You can use one, all, or a combination of these Folders depending on the size and scope of the projects your PMO team manages. You can filter, sort, group, and save views within your Folders for additional customization.
| Folder | Description |
| Phased Projects | Create a phased projects Folder for each phased project or program your team is working on. This is ideal for complex waterfall projects because views at the Folder level provide visibility across all phases. Each project should have a Folder, and each step of a project should have its own List. With this setup, project team members can focus on tasks in a single List, depending on the stage of the project. |
| Cross-functional Projects | Create a cross-functional projects Folder for each project or program that requires cross-department or cross-functional collaboration. Each project should have a Folder, and each department involved should have its own List. With this setup, collaborators can focus on tasks in a single List, depending on their department. Create a Gantt view at the Folder level to see Dependencies and plan projects. Views at the Folder level provide visibility across all departments and functions. |
| Simple Projects | Create a simple projects Folder to hold all of your smaller projects in one location. Each project should have a List within this Folder. |
| Portfolio | Create a portfolio Folder for leadership to track and prioritize all your projects in one location. We recommend setting up a PMO Roadmap and Project Health List within this Folder. These Lists are covered in the next section. Use Tasks in Multiple Lists so tasks can exist in both their project Lists and portfolio Lists. |
| Templates | Templates enable you to recreate commonly used workflows in a few clicks. We recommend creating a separate Folder for all of your templates to ensure changes aren't made to them. |
Organize your PMO Lists
There are many ways to organize your Lists for PMO, so we've outlined our favorite recommendations below. You can filter, sort, group, and save views within your Lists for additional customization.
Program Management Lists
We recommend creating a Program Management List for each project Folder so you can consolidate administrative tasks. Create a recurring Status Report task for the project manager to communicate important updates every week.
Phased Project Lists
We recommend creating one List for each phase of your project. For example, a waterfall project may have four distinct phases, equating to 4 Lists. Project managers can use List and Board views filtered by task status to keep everyone aligned and on schedule. You can use a Gantt view at the Folder level to see all project phases in one view. Gantt view also allows you to quickly identify task Dependencies and Milestones.
Cross-functional Project Lists
We recommend creating one List per department in your organization. Alone, each List is a simple task List. In combination with other department Lists in the Folder, you can set up views to see all work across all teams in one location. This makes it easy to identify task Dependencies and blockers.
Simple Project Lists
We recommend creating one List for each project. Group tasks by assignee, status, Custom Fields, and more to ensure your projects meet their deadlines. Save grouping edits as new views to come back to them anytime.
Portfolio Lists
We recommend creating the following Lists for your Portfolio Folder:
| PMO Roadmap | Create a PMO Roadmap List to keep track of all projects in your portfolio, including new project requests. You can use Forms to automate the intake process and Custom Fields to organize important project details, success metrics, and more. |
| Project Health | Create a Project Health List to highlight ongoing project updates. Both leadership and individual contributors can use this List to see overall progress and strategic next steps. Use Custom Fields and Tags to identify and organize different types of tasks. |
Organize your PMO tasks
Whether you use a program management List or task, we recommend creating recurring Status Report tasks in your project health List.
Make sure the Tasks in Multiple Lists ClickApp is enabled and create an Automation at the Space level. This lets you automatically add tasks to the project health List when their Custom Field is changed to status report. Read more about the Custom Fields we recommend for PMO and Automations we recommend for PMO.
Instead of creating and maintaining separate status reports, the technical program manager updates the recurring tasks by providing a weekly comment with the status.
Communicate status report updates to stakeholders by mentioning task watchers or emailing the task to people outside ClickUp.
Interested stakeholders can be added as watchers to be notified of the weekly updates, and teammates can use comments and @mentions to collaborate.
Add a Comment Custom Field to your project health List view so people can see the latest and previous status without opening the task.