Has anyone had any experience with setting up what is effectively a PMO, without the responsibility of delivering projects? In my organization we have managers who have project leads who deliver projects, but the processes are diverse and non-standardized. My proposal to my boss is to create a Project Support and Mentoring Group that will maintain templates, best practices, even do occasional reviews and audits of projects to ensure adherance.
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Michael BrownProject Manager| JPMorganChaseDeerfield, Il, United States
Very reasonable. At Bank One (formerly First Chicago NBD), we created an Enterprise Project Support Office that, among other things, provided these services:
- PM Mentoring & Coaching - Facilitation (Kickoff meetings, JAD sessions) - QA reviews - Training classes on SDLC & PM Methods - Development of best practices - Support for Enterprise tools (PM related) etc...
Contact me for more info if you're interested.
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Anonymous
Your idea is very possible and is probably done in more organizations than you realize. It's difficult for many companies to go to a strict projectized environement, so you see functional teams implementing and managing projects. Although they may be technical experts, you typically don't have both technical and project management expertise in the same person. For this reason, you should have someone that is resposnsible for establishing processes & procedures, reporting requirements, creating templates, preparing for audits, etc. I have seen some suggest that this role is an overhead function, and they are correct. Companies have many overhead functions, but the ones that survive are those that can show they add value to the organization. If you can show that adding this function can create increased project success, provide better consistentcy, improve communications, protect against adverse audit findings, then it should be an easy sell to any level of leadership. Saving Changes...
Hi Kevin! Not only is your idea plausible, it can be very effective. Many companies have similar support organizations. Tom Block's all to short book "The Project Office" (Crisp Pulications, 1998. ISBN 1-56052-443-X)supports this concept and may be useful to you as you define and sell the service in your organization. I have considerable experience doing just what you describe. One piece of advice: get high level sponsorship of the idea. The higher the level of sponsorship, the more value the office will have to the organization and the easier it will be for you to implement the standards necessary to add lasting value. If you'd like to discuss this further, feel free to e-mail me at: [email protected] Saving Changes...
