The Freedom to Innovate

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.

  Innovation   PMO  

I recently observed a conversation between two PMO leaders who were in charge of very different PMOs. While both were execution focused--concentrating on projects and project managers rather than strategy and portfolios--the span of control and priorities were very different.

One PMO leader was in charge of what I consider to be a very traditional project control PMO. He was accountable for the project methodology, for centralized reporting and tracking, and for project audit and control. As such, he was very keen on structure and rigor to the way the projects under his control were executed. The other PMO leader was tasked with creating an empowered project management team, and by extension project execution teams. Her focus was on PM skills development and coaching, collaboration, best practice development and sharing, etc.

The conversation between them was around how to get the best performance out of project managers, both individually and as a group. As you might imagine from the brief summary of the PMOs they led, they had very different perspectives on what worked best and what didn’t. It was a good natured conversation, and they both had an understanding of the other’s perspective--but it struck me that this conversation was really a microcosm of some of the things going on every day in project management. There always seems to be a compromise …

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