Archive for April, 2010

It is all about current state: OR If you don’t know where you’ve been, how do you know where you are going? If you are ever faced with establishing current state to help with your metrics, consider the following diagram to guide your thinking.  Let me start with the Assess phase and break into the...
Read more »

Leaders of PMO’s, COE’s and Learning and Development departments have historically been willing to buy hope.  They believed that if they invest in developing the skills of their people (project managers, project team members and managers of project mangers) then the individuals will benefit and the organisation will as well—they were willing to buy...
Read more »

Quite frankly, I don’t know a project manager running a PMO who doesn’t want to get better and improve the value the PMO is providing.  How is this done?  Through evolution, but not the type described by the great Charles Darwin shown below.  In fact, Dr. Hobbs discovered a co-evolutionary process underway with PMOs;...
Read more »

I wrote in my last blog that we need to focus on bringing value, not just costs (after all, we do cost something to show up everyday) to our organisation.  So, how do we do this?  Well, first, let’s take a look at the concept of value. Determining the PMO’s Value Who sits in almighty judgment...
Read more »

It is very clear to me that the interest in the PMO has never been higher.  Much to my chagrin I remarked to several colleagues more than five years ago, that the rising interest in the PMO was nothing more than a fad that would soon die out (not PMO’s themselves, mind you…just the...
Read more »

And so we come to the concluding episode of our hypothetical PMO saga. In our second examination of the PMO case study featuring “Company B” we projected how the company might address its project management issues by the creation of a professionally-staffed PMO (or two).  In our last scenario, we ended with the suggestion that...
Read more »

Now, those of you who read the hypothetical case study in my previous Blog may be wondering what might happen to our two intrepid professional project managers – the unrecognised prophets of “Company B”. As you know, in the scenario, the company might address its short-term crisis in property management by adopting an organisation structure...
Read more »

It is said that a prophet is never recognised in his/her own land. Let me hypothesise a case in point.   Two professionally-qualified project managers working for an organisation (“Company B” in the representational Model #1 below), with turnover in the billions, write a paper detailing why its major projects keep failing and what needs to...
Read more »

A while back I worked within an enterprise Project Management Office and had the job title “Special Projects Manager”. Now some of may see this as a glorified way to describe the guy who gets all the jobs that the Director doesn’t want to do!  And whilst you may be partially right, it did...
Read more »

A friend of mine recently emailed me, he had an interview and was being asked to present on the subject of the Benefits of a PSO and wanted to know if I could help him. My immediate reaction was that I could easily present on the benefits, but then I got thinking, what really...
Read more »