Defining

Evaluating Organizational Readiness for a PMO

by David Blumhorst

Adoption of a Program Management Office is not a decision that should be made quickly or taken lightly. Careful preparation, clear alignment with organization objectives and stakeholder feedback are critical to a PMO’s success.

PMO Trends

by Patti Gilchrist, PMP

Many PMOs do not fully understand their role within the larger enterprise. What can PMOs do to improve lackluster performance and increase the return on investment? Let’s look at a few of the emerging trends for PMOs to help answer that question...

Initiating

You Wanna Be Starting Something?

by Mike Donoghue

Determining the nature and scope of a project is essential to refining how the resulting effort will accomplish business needs. A crucial component of this is having the knowledge of the business environment and the demands it must meet.

Project Governance: Overcoming Obstacles

by Michael Wood

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.

Planning

The Problem with PMOs and Governance

by Andy Jordan

Organizations that take project governance for granted are headed for a fall. There is one area where governance seems to be failing in many organizations, and it's perhaps surprising--the PMO. That is incredibly dangerous, and here’s why...

Recovering from Project Failure

by Andy Jordan

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?

Executing

What Do Your PMs Think of Your PMO?

by Andy Jordan

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.

How Emergency Response Helps Project Execution

by Jiju (Jay) Nair, PMP

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.

Controlling

PMO-level Issue Management

by Andy Jordan

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.

Who's Governing Your Governance Committee?

by Andy Jordan

If governance is designed to ensure that project execution occurs appropriately, then who ensures that governance occurs appropriately? To try and avoid conflict, an organization needs to ensure that governance committees operate with a series of guidelines.

Closing

Who Owns Benefit Measurement?

by Andy Jordan

How does your organization ensure that benefits realization occurs? For so many projects, there is never any measurement of whether projected gains were actually achieved. In this article, we look at how the PMO can assist in improving that situation.

The Professional Services PMO

by Andy Jordan

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...

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