PMO-level Issue Management

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.

  Communications Management   PMO   Portfolio Management   Risk Management  

Every project has an issues log--a summary of the various challenges that the project has faced, who was assigned to investigate and resolve them, whether they had to be escalated, what the ultimate solution was, and hopefully what steps were taken to prevent the issue from recurring.

This is all good, basic project management--and is something that PMs are taught from very early on in their training. 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, I want to 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.

The role of the PMO as an information hub
One of the functions that a PMO should have is acting as a communications hub. When we think about status reporting, everyone accepts that as a natural fit--PMs deliver status reports into the PMO, which then consolidates the reports and issues a summary level program/portfolio report to executive management. However, when we go beyond status reports, the hub role becomes less well-defined for most PMOs.

But why can’t the same model work for issues? If each project provided a copy of the issue log to the …

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