George Jucan is an experienced Project Manager Professional (PMP) with 20 years of technical and management experience in complex environments, both in public and private sector. He is well known in the project management community as a successful IT project management consultant, speaker at public events, trainer and author of project management articles.
Increasing pressure from stakeholders for efficiency forces most organizations to find new ways to ensure every dollar is judiciously spent, both in private and public sector. It is no surprise that companies realized that independent projects--each with its own objective, resources and methodology (stove-pipes)--are either overlapping or allowing gaps in the coverage of business needs, both being a waste of money: Either by duplicating work in the first place, or by costly plug-ins and/or rework after delivery.
Cross-projects coordination was one of the most obvious responses to the above issue. More or less formal, this overall view of most if not all projects executed allows aligning the pieces of the puzzle early in their lifecycle, when the adjustment costs are minor. The most common coordination form (and the least formal) simply consists of a charter and/or scope statement review by the PMO, or a presentation of upcoming projects in the regular meeting of all project managers.
While each project manager is generally aware of other project with potential impact, they have no clear responsibility to coordinate with each other. This method works well for a small number of project managers, but a larger number of projects will make peer coordination inefficient.
To improve this, a senior project manager (typically from the PMO) will be assigned to support and/or