The PM-Lite Organization
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.
I had a drink with a former colleague a few weeks ago and he was complaining about the way that project management was treated in his new company. According to him it was very difficult to manage projects successfully because there was no support infrastructure--no PMO, no set methodology, no consistency among the PMs, etc. This got me thinking: Do we really need a full team of people and a full library of processes backing us up to be good project managers?
Clearly, the strong PMO can add benefit to the way that projects are managed. But they can also bring considerable overhead--budget-conscious organizations can’t afford them, but they can still have successful project management, can’t they? Let’s take a look at how to manage projects when it’s just the PM against the world.
The lean, mean project structure
Here’s a scenario that some of you may have come across. The project management function is you--that’s it. There’s no PMO, no PM curriculum, no project control of project support officers, no methodology, no tools, no templates…just you.
That’s about as low-budget a PM structure as you can get, but so what? Everything has to start somewhere, and if you know how to leverage the structure to your advantage there is no reason why you can’t be successful (which in turn will likely lead …
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