Data Management and the Portfolio Execution PMO

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   Portfolio Management  

A year or so back, I spoke to an individual who had been asked to build a PMO in his organization. The company had been practicing fairly structured formal project management for some time, but it had been executed within different business units and they now wanted to consolidate that expertise into a single PMO. One of the challenges that this new PMO manager was facing was that all of the different business areas had been managing projects differently--different approaches, different processes and different tools and templates. This manager knew that he had to find ways to leverage all of the existing information that existed on historic projects, but it was spread out across spreadsheets, a number of different project management tools and even hard copy only in some circumstances.

This manager was in disagreement with his boss about how to address that situation. He felt that he needed to invest in an enterprise-wide tool and have someone in the PMO manage that tool to both build a central history and to ensure that there was consistency going forward in the way that projects were managed. His boss thought that it was an unnecessarily expensive and disruptive investment and that the PMO would be better off focused on developing and implementing a consistent approach to project execution. While I can see both sides of the argument to some degree, I have a very …

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