Dear Anonymous, often times some PMOs take an initial view that all formal or traditional projects are managed through the PMO via the PMO processes, tools, and project management resources and that other project efforts outside the PMO are called something else and not managed by the PMO. This view is typically more of a policy and intended to hone in on and focus the mission and efforts of the PMO rather than a distinction or suggesting that other kinds of projects throughout the organizational are not projects.
However, projects of all shapes and sizes exist throughout an enterprise in just about every department and organization. You mentioned your application group managing bug fixes, releases and maintenance as projects. How about the marketing guy managing a project such as the annual customer conference in Hawaii that takes six months to plan and has a budget of $500,000. Or the sales operation executive managing a GTM project, or the HR guy managing a project to conduct mandatory training on a new company HR policy, or the R&D guy managing a research project to determine new product alternatives, or the finance guy with a project to benchmark the companies financial performance to their best in class competitors. Are these not projects? Of course they are, but none of these efforts will ever be part of the PMO formal project portfolio or find their way into the PMO PPM tool nor, perhaps, should they.
More and more, organizations are establishing project management as a best practice and core competence throughout the enterprise as there is tremendous value in having such project efforts managed via a project management best practice rather than ad hoc. Often, the PMO plays a leadership role in both managing the formal project portfolio as well as providing an organizational project management framework to institutionalize project management as an enterprise core competence providing scalable best practices to differing project types (sdlc, pmbok, change management, product to market, process improvement, etc) and sizes. The distinction that a project is unique, temporary, has a measurable outcome, etc. is one thing, the policy of what projects are handled by the PMO is another thing. Nice post, I hope we hear and learn from others.
Good luck..!
Mark Perry
VP of Customer Care
BOT International
