Overview

What is the price of missing critical project dates?

Who is accountable for all everything coming together at the right time for all projects?

Can you identify and resolve potential delays in your portfolio of projects or the status of all your projects?

A Program or Project Management Office (PMO):

• Matches business goals with appropriate technology platform or solutions
• Provides centralized control of all projects under the program umbrella
• Reduces time to market
• Increases communication and coordination across all projects in your portfolio
• Provides increased resource utilization across the organization and matches skills to project needs
• Manages and enforces project priorities
• Manages and controls scope, change, cost, risk, and quality across all projects
• Provides increased Client Satisfaction with project related work and operational support:
• One place to go for all project status and communication
• Support staff for project services
• Reduced project costs because common tasks could be managed at PMO level

When to Use a Project/Program Office

Create and maintain a Program Management Office if:

• Conditions or scope is changing throughout the project - extra expertise is necessary to manage this change
• Multiple contractors are selected via a bid process - clearly defined scope is necessary prior to contractor expertise being on board; pre-qualification of contractors is critical
• Multiple contractors are necessary because of the complexity or size of the project - a single contractor does not have all the expertise to do the work and management of multiple contractors requires a centralized view of the solution.
• Design and implementation are done by separate contractors
• The client organization is diverse and may be difficult to get cooperation unless they are actively managed
• Time to market - Whenever time to market is a critical factor in completing the project
• Multiple vendors - Whenever there are multiple vendors or services for a given project or program
• Diverse geographic locations - Whenever the solution is being implemented across diverse geographic locations
• Limited resources - Whenever limited resources need to accomplish multiple tasks
• Multiple projects - Whenever you have multiple projects under the same program umbrella or multiple initiatives utilizing the same resources

PMO Advantages

Designing and implementing projects in today's environment or even managing change in today's environment is more complex than ever before.  With multiple vendors, as well as a diverse range of partnerships and alliances, today's project landscape is as complex as it has ever been.  Trying to manage multiple projects for the same program initiative adds more complexity to the management team.  Unresolved issues can delay projects for weeks and months, which can turn into lost revenue, a lost competitive advantage, and an unhappy client.

A dedicated PMO provides the oversight to deliver your projects on time and on budget by managing your schedule, scope, and resources while watching the cost and quality across the whole portfolio.  The PMO provides expertise tailored to your business requirements while taking responsibility for all projects included in your portfolio or program.  A PMO provides the extra focus and resources complex projects demand.

The main focus of the PMO is to coordinate multiple projects under the Program/Portfolio umbrella and be the center of excellence supporting project managers in the implementation of the functions required to achieve successful projects.  The PMO is staffed by project and program professionals and will consolidate project resource plans, financials reporting, project schedules, change, risk and quality information into master documents to deliver your projects on time and on budget; directing and monitoring the projects to ensure quality; and disseminating project information.  The PMO offers project management tools, support, mentoring, project portfolio management, and quality assurance.  The Project/Program Management Office provides economies of scale not found in a single project team and offers a single point of contact for all information on the projects under the program umbrella.

The PMO helps to keep critical projects on time and within the budget by providing accountability at every stage, from initiation to acceptance.  PMO personnel identify and resolve common issues before they add time to already short time to market pressures.  The PMO provides expertise tailored to your business requirements along with the extra focus and resources complex projects demand helping maintain project momentum by contributing in these areas:

Consolidated Administrative Support - PMO personnel can make the lives of project team members easier by assuming administrative chores for project scheduling, report production and distribution, project management software operation, and maintaining the project/program/portfolio "War Room" along with common documents.  The PMO receives, consolidates, and distributes information for all projects under the program/portfolio umbrella. 

Providing Project Management Consulting and Mentoring - The PMO will oversee the operations of each individual project and project manager; offering mentoring, support, and training as needed. 

Resource Allocation - With limited resources, it is critical to have the right people at the right place doing the right jobs.  The PMO is in a position to assign project managers and project team members matching needs with specialized skills, availability, and geographic needs as well as balance the workload of project managers.  By doing so, the PMO ensures resources are being used efficiently throughout all projects under the umbrella of the program/portfolio.

Vendor Management - Many details need special attention when purchasing hardware, software, and services from any vendor.  The PMO provides objective accountability to identify and resolve issues that can delay the specification and delivery of the project.

Formation of a PMO

In a number of cases, the PMO is both a physical location and project personnel.  To start a PMO, the company officer responsible for project delivery will have to select an individual or individuals capable of:

• Managing and tracking multiple projects at the same time
• Training, mentoring, and coaching project managers
• Communicating on all levels of project delivery
• Managing and negotiating with contractors

Additionally, it is recommended a company set aside a physical location or "War Room" to be used for the PMO.  The room should be set up to accommodate the tracking and management of information such as whiteboards to allow the posting and tracking of project schedules, financials, and resource schedules. 

A web-based Virtual PMO or other collaborative workspace should be implemented to allow the project teams to collaborate.  At minimum, the web-based solution should have:

• A common calendar to communicate important project dates
• A master project set up with all project templates and processes which can be duplicated for each project
• A project documentation library allowing project team members to update and share information
• An area to post and update project tasks.  In many cases, it is advantageous to allow import and export from an external project-scheduling tool.
• The collaborative workspace would also allow PMO personnel to consolidate the information from multiple projects, provide mentoring for improvement, and highlight best practices or other noteworthy items. 
• Utilizing an Executive Information System front-end into the collaborative workspace could provide real-time status on all active projects to company and/or client management.

Steps for PMO Creation

1.       Charter the PMO.

It is critical to be very clear concerning the purpose and goals of any PMO. This should not be taken for granted. It should be determined in a workshop with the stakeholders if necessary. While the purpose of the business initiative being supported must be understood, the specific charter for the PMO itself must be documented and agreed upon as well. What is the authority of the PMO? What is it expected to accomplish? How will it be measured and by what process?

2.       Identify and define desired business benefits and measurement methods.

The PMO must understand the desired business benefits. How will success be measured?  In many cases, the business benefits are not understood well enough to be clearly documented. One of the functions of a PMO is to ensure that the targeted business benefits are clearly documented, agreed among the stakeholders and communicated to all concerned. To accomplish this may require workshops designed to get all stakeholders to align on the same set of objectives. A means of gathering, measuring, evaluating and reporting metrics related to business benefits must also be defined. 

3.       Define governance structure.
The need for governance is one of the best reasons to institute a PMO. Very often the strongest rules of governance related to a business initiative will be found within a PMO. Some of the questions are -- How will the PMO be organized? How will the PMO interact with the operational and developmental functions in the organization? What will the reporting structure look like? Who will be responsible to whom? What reporting processes will be used for status and progress reporting? Where will the PMO itself report? In some cases the PMO reports to a steering committee. In other cases it might report to the board. It's of critical importance to spell this out during PMO set-up.

4.       Define the impact management process.
The process for management, tracking and resolution of issues, impacts, changes and risks must be established. This will include information gathering and reporting, a means for defining when these events have occurred, escalation paths, reporting and the means for resolution and mitigation as well.  A clearly defined document storage process must be set up and communicated to all stakeholders. 

5.       Define leadership and communications protocols.
Governance is focused on management. Leadership is related to keeping the vision and purpose of the PMO in mind through constant communication regarding both a reiteration of purpose as well as clear communication as change occurs. In setting up a PMO the means of communication and the leadership principles that will be applied must be defined. How will change be communicated, and the decisions related to change be executed? Who will be responsible to keep the vision and direction that should drive the PMO constantly in everyone's mind? 

6.       Define portfolio/program wide risks and develop mitigation strategy.
Known risks associated with the initiative and a means for mitigating them must be documented as part of set-up. Once the PMO is under way, risk management is a function of impact management.

7.       Define Change Control strategy

All projects under the control of the PMO should manage change in the same way and all change control documents should be coordinated by the PMO.  The PMO Director should be a member of the Change Control Board, reviewing all changes submitted for approval.

8.       Define project support function.
The projects within the PMO will require support so that methods, tools and procedures can be used in a uniform manner and economies of scale can be achieved. This function by itself is of tremendous value and is sometimes mistaken for the PMO function itself. In any case, project support is an important aspect of a PMO.

9.       Define integration approach and methods.
The means of managing and integrating each of the streams of work required to achieve the business objective and deliver the business benefits of the initiatives the PMO is supporting must be defined. If the initiative is to be supported by many projects, a master schedule of all the projects and their dependencies must be maintained, for example. How this will be accomplished on a day-to-day basis must be defined and communicated to all stakeholders and managers within the initiative and PMO.  The PMO should set the ground rules for the project management methodology and templates to be used during project implementation; and should maintain them as part of their charter. 

10.   Get Started!

• Hire the PMO Director
• Set up the web-based PMO and the physical space if needed
• Agree on the project management methodology and templates to be used
• Create the training course
• Train all project team members in the process, the collaborative workspace, the methodology, and the templates
• Start managing all projects with the methodology as a guide and use the collaborative workspace
• Coach and mentor project teams
• Consolidate all project documentations into PMO documentation