The reality is, a successful PMO has to be a product of the company it serves. If the PMO leadership chooses to fight a noble fight, it should choose those battles very wisely. But I get ahead of myself. I am a project manager working for a fabulously successful mutual fund management firm. The firm has achieved its success by strictly adhering to its belief that markets work - risk and return are inextricably linked.
The PMO was created to build processes to support the firm's rapid growth. A few things have been key to PMO 1.0 - seasoned PMO leadership, executive participation in project prioritization, and successful project delivery.
The best process the PMO has put in place is a project review committee. It is a subset of firm executives who approve and stack rank every project initiated at the firm (over 80 hours). The best thing about this process, is that the firm's leadership thinks of nearly all initiatives as projects. The firm does not have a strong sense of hierarchy, or departmental functional management, so the management structure being put in place is project management.
Our PMO provides services to all comers. If you need help on your project, we will do it if we have the resources. We do everything from full service project management and business analysis, to template sharing and training. We have not established firm-wide standards for projects, we don't audit. For projects we are managing, we use a good waterfall methodology, task tracking template, MS project plan, and QuickBase. We don't have any enforcement responsibility, and we have a limited executive mandate. The PMO provides a bit of an insurance policy for wasted project money.
In my next post, I'll talk the business case for project management.
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