What is your PMO’s reputation among the PMs it serves? There could be a lot of distrust. Through experience, one manager discovered some potential problem areas that you may want to look at in your own organization.
While many projects may not have to adopt the elements of the Federal Incident Command System, some are set up to resolve a certain time-bound resolution of organizational priorities and can reap the benefits.
Every project has an issues log. But what about the PMO? Does your PMO manage issues and maintain an issues log? Do you look for trends across the issues of different projects and take proactive steps to address them? Do you attempt to prevent issues through good communication? In this article, we look at a model for PMO-level issue management and suggest ways that it can improve the quality of projects that your PMO is responsible for.
Major project failure can happen to anyone. What’s important is to make sure that the organization can recover from such a situation, and that requires both advance planning (it’s too late to start planning the recovery when the disaster has already happened) and strong execution. Is your PMO prepared?
An application has been bolted together piece by piece, and it’s threatening to break any day. It’s now been handed to the PMO with the mandate to try and modernize it--and make it a tool for today that can truly act as a hub for other tools without alienating the current user base. So what does the PMO do? Read about a voyage into (potential) salvation.
One of the primary roles of the PMO is to provide a framework for ensuring proper governance over projects. Here we look at some of the obstacles and challenges facing the PMO governance function--and some tips for overcoming them.
We all know that process improvement is important, but who should deliver it? Whoever owns a process should also be accountable for the improvement of it--and when we are talking about PM processes, that frequently means the PMO.
As a PMO leader, are you driving change, or is it driving you? In all too many cases, PMOs are reactive--implementing a solution in response to a problem. In this article, we argue for a more proactive approach.
When systems are operational in nature and not being implemented or changed, the organization changes from project management to just plain management. The PMO should not get lost in this transition.
CI programs within PMOs aren’t doomed to failure from the outset; they just need to be well managed. If an organization does not improve the way that it executes projects, then it will simply repeat the same mistakes over and over. In addition, as the organization evolves, if the PMO’s processes and methodology remain unchanged, then they will become less and less effective.
What’s the effect on a PMO when leadership changes? When someone comes into a new role--especially one as visible as a department head--it can be tempting to want to make an early impact, but is that the right mindset? Here, we explore some of the things to consider.
One manager's clients asked him to assist with improving the effectiveness of their PMO. They made it clear that the office was only responsible for the professional services arm of the business--and they weren’t prepared to discuss extending the scope of the PMO to include the product development team. Read on for more on this unique situation...
It’s one of the oldest debates in project management, and now there are a whole new set of arguments. What type of project manager should an organization have?
Have you considered an administrative support role for your PMO? Administrative functions within a PMO can work well and deliver tremendous efficiencies, but to work properly they require a very distinct environment.
Enterprise PMOs are going to continue to grow and evolve--and over time the vast majority of organizations will evolve their PMO models to an EPMO model. However, as we look at the way that companies manage their PMOs today, we can’t help thinking that there is a lot of work ahead.
To really get environmental awareness to stick in an organization, you have to be prepared to go beyond setting an example and start to define green-aware policy and create a culture of sustainability. Here, we look at some practical, easy-to-implement ways that you can start to have a smaller environmental footprint when you execute on projects.
Are you putting your PMO in the position to make the right decisions every time? While the PMO has many functions, one of the most important is to facilitate decision-making--either by senior project stakeholders or within their own teams as escalation points for project managers. In this article, we look at how to ensure that we are as effective as possible in that process.
Project managers need to support one another--does your PMO support that? A lot of organizations recognize the need to have project managers share best practices and ideas across the PMO, but very few do it well. Here's some advice for adopting the right model.
There are many ways to do the dashboard badly, and a few ways to get it right. Here, we explore some of the important aspects of a dashboard--and perhaps more importantly the controls and processes that need to be in place to support it and ensure that the content is accurate and meaningful.
The project management office has a different role in the operational team than in project teams. In general, there are two major reasons for having a PMO as part of the operational team--and it's up to the PMO to ensure that it is supporting operations instead of hindering them.
While working for a small firm, a new PM was asked to go to a major company to help them integrate their IT PMOs...leading to the worst three months of his career. As his two-part article concludes, we find out if if there was truly a light at the end of the tunnel--or just a train coming the other way.
While working for a small firm, a new PM was asked to go to a major company to help them integrate their IT PMOs...leading to the worst three months of his career. In this two-part article, he guides you through his experience: what he did, what he took from it and how he would do things differently.
How many people in your organization know what the PMO actually does? Here, we look at the work that the PMO can do to help a key group of people understand how the PMO operates: project stakeholders.
Just in case you are not satisfied with a thankless workforce, there are ways you can use PMO influence to directly improve their daily work lives--and get their support for all your PMO efforts.
More and more, companies are looking at project management from an organization-wide perspective, but they are making assumptions about the current state of project execution within those organizations. How hard can it be to identify the projects underway and the teams managing them? It shouldn't be too difficult to inventory the project portfolio...right?
Organizations are expected to deliver more and more with less and less, and that has in part led to the growth of organizational project management. But in this writer's experience, organizations have not been able to define what a successful OPM model looks like. How do you maximize the return on Organizational PM?
Organizations do a lot to implement what is viewed as project management. But do organizations have an organizational project management capability? To understand whether we do or not, we have to understand what this actually means, explore where organizations are today and evaluate how close we actually are to the attainment of this goal.
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"If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right." - Mary Kay Ash |
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