Does Your PMO Believe in You?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  PMO  

For many of us, summer is a distant memory. The kids are back into the school routine, and the holidays are fast approaching. For project managers, it’s frequently a very busy—and potentially very stressful—time of year.

That’s because the end of the year is getting close, and that frequently means that a lot of projects are nearing their deadline. Sometimes that’s because the calendar year end coincides with the organization’s fiscal year end; sometimes it’s just a convenient, arbitrary date. It doesn’t always strike me as logical to have so many initiatives wrapping up in such a compressed time window, especially when that window is also a holiday period for many, but that’s the reality many PMs face.

And of course, it’s not just a stressful time for project managers. Team members feel that pressure. Resource owners are faced with having to juggle multiple potentially conflicting assignment requests. Stakeholders are dealing with challenges and potential issues that may have serious implications, and they don’t have much time to correct them.

PMOs aren’t immune, either. They are inevitably going to be involved in trying to juggle allocations of resources, resolve conflicting priorities, helping with the removal of barriers, recovering from delays, handling triggering risks, and so on. It can all …

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