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In Part 1 of this posting I ran through a list of questions that I had put forward during a training class that I ran entitled “Establishing the PMO”. Here we will look at a selection of answers given to key questions together with an indication of the position of the respondent on the business. Where...
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As readers will be very much aware there is an increasing interest in the establishment of a “Project Management Office”.  This is happening in organisations operating in diverse fields from IT to Construction to Pharmaceuticals to Financial Services.  In a previous Blog, I discussed (from the perspective of an uninformed and objective observer) just...
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In my previous past I covered how a Steering Group needs to give strategic direction.  Here we will see the importance of the Steering Group supporting the Project/Programme Manager. Support the Project/Program Manager. The more significant a Project/Programme is to an organisation, the more vital it is that the Steering Group actively supports the Project/Programme Manager,...
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Although in practice the role of the Steering Group is complex, the guiding principles by which it should function are simple: Give Strategic Direction Support the Project/Programme Manager Thus, a Steering Group typically comprises senior managers who have a vested interest in the delivery and/or outcome of the project/programme. Give Strategic Direction Normally, the members of a Steering Group...
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In my previous posting we looked at the why and the what of the PMO.  In this section I will focus on how a PMO comes into being and why sometimes it seems to come up against barriers to its effectiveness.  A newly-created PMO will typically be closely monitored from within the business.  Supportive senior...
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Have you ever wondered how a Project Management Office (PMO) comes into being?  Perhaps you thought that it simply springs into being fully formed and functioning?  Sometimes it might seem so to those who aren’t actively engaged in its creation or who are remote from the business area in which it finds its genesis. ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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