The Project Reporting Problem

Humberto promotes high professional standards in IT and Information Security management using methodologies and best practices. He has extensive IT auditing and consultancy experience managing simultaneous and complex IT projects.

  Estimating   PMO   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

Many years ago while starting my career as system programmer and developer (in those days using IBM mainframes), I was introduced to a new way of managing projects in IT. A consultancy firm was hired to implement a PMO—although in those days, this office was not called “PMO.” The name they used was “projects controlling,” and it was just a replica of a similar thing that was being used by the main software manufacturers at the time.

Project controlling consisted of three parts:

Step 1: You were responsible for the project, but you were just assigned as executer, not project manager. Those were the old days. You had to deliver complete planning (not yet a “plan,” but only a schedule) of your project, with any task in the plan not being bigger than two hours; that was the rule. So imagine the big development projects! (In case you were wondering, no WBS either.)

Step 2: Once a week, you reported (in a physical paper, signed by you) the tasks of your plan that were actually accomplished during the week to the Project Controller Office.

Step 3: The project controller (an antecedent of the current PMO position) calculated the estimated day of completion based on your plan. This information was presented to the CIO, and you (being “responsible” for projects) had to explain any deviation in an all-day meeting with the …

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