The 5 Critical Elements to Creating a Project Management Center of Excellence

Michael Stanleigh, CMC, CSP is the CEO of Business Improvement Architects. He works with leaders and their teams around the world to improve organizational performance by helping to define their strategic direction, increase leadership performance, create cultures that drive innovation and improve project and quality management. He has been instrumental in helping his clients increase productivity and profits with his innovative approaches and focus on quality.

  Strategy  

Creating a Project Management Center of Excellence is the driving force that takes an organization forward to realize its project management mandate. It encompasses the process of creating a strategy for project management, re-shaping the culture to be more focused on the consistency in the management of projects an implementing a project management process.

Creating a Project Management Center of Excellence
A Center of Excellence is a business unit that has organization-wide authority. The key elements include:

1. Vision and Strategies: A clear vision of what it represents and the strategies to identify how it will reach this vision in the short and long term.
2. Competencies: The selection of resources based on project competency requirements compared to actual project resource competencies. The identification of coaching, training and other developmental activities to close any competency gap.
3. Culture: How to re-shape the organizational culture to be more supportive of the consistency in the management of projects.
4. Processes: The right processes, tools and templates that are helpful and meaningful to project managers and their teams.
5. Quality: The quality criteria for the project management framework, processes and documents.

1. Create the Vision and Strategies
One approach to creating a vision for the Center of Excellence is to brainstorm ideas that focus …

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