NOTE: For the remainder of this paper, the generic term PMO can refer to Enterprise Program/Project Office (EPO), Program/Project Management Office (PMO), or Project Management Center of Excellence (PMCE).

The implementation of project management and project delivery capability involves five key areas of focus and these MUST be accomplished under the direction and coordination of a central PMO.  The focus areas are:

1.      Identity – creating job descriptions including training needs and a training progression along with certification, coaching and mentoring

2.      Project Management Practice – including a methodology or process incorporating standardized templates, toolkits, and a collaborative workspace for project personnel

3.      Tools – selected to meet the greatest number of needs from all project teams following industry recognized best practices

4.      Implementation – once that you have identified the previous three items, you must implement them company or enterprise-wide

5.      Review or Audit – inspect what you expect and make necessary changes.

Most organizations have discovered the impact of projects on the success of the enterprise and have acknowledged project management as a distinct and valuable discipline.  What they have yet to recognize is the importance of implementing project management under the same structures and centralization that has become the paradigm for most other disciplines including the company itself.

As an emerging discipline with wide corporate impact, it is even more essential to provide structured leadership for project management than any other function in the enterprise.  Through this centralized leadership, we can meet important needs not served without the PMO function. The PMO addresses the following needs:

1. It creates and maintains an available workforce of people skilled in the art and science of project management and serves as a center of excellence for project management.
2. PMO personnel view their job totally as project management, eliminating the conflict with other responsibilities and business functions. Measurements (and rewards) can be developed more along the lines of critical project success factors.
3. PMO personnel reside outside of the individual technical functions, removing home territory biases.
4. Using a collaborative project management tool, the PMO becomes a repository for project experience, standards, approaches, lessons learned and best practices...to be shared with the all project leaders and teams.
5. The PMO maintains awareness of the "big picture," seeing the all programs and projects in the company’s Project Portfolio.  Therefore, the PMO is more readily able to monitor trends and see global problems or opportunities.  The PMO is in the best position to provide information and reports to senior management, provide guidance on project selection, alignment and staffing; and to make recommendations to resolve conflicts and problems.

The Gartner Group (among others) has documented the justification for the PMO.  They cite three classes of services that can be provided by the PMO in an IT organization:

1. Project Management Services – trainer, consultant, practitioner of PM practices and techniques.
   • Clarify the role of projects and project management in the enterprise
   • Establish a standard project management methodology, including tools, a collaborative environment, and communication standards
   • Develop forms and templates to facilitate the development of project estimates, project management plans, project schedules, risk management, issues management, change management, project acceptance, and project reports
   • Provide a training progression in project management and project management tools
   • Provide coaching, guidance, and mentoring
   • Develop and validate a workforce of trained and competent project managers
2. Methods, Processes and Metrics – guardian of corporate methodology, standards, estimating guidelines, and metrics.  
   • Review and audit the implementation of project management in the enterprise to insure good project management practices are being applied and provide assistance in complying with standard project management practices (training, coaching and mentoring)
   • Emphasis is on sharing and exchange rather than corporate edicts. 
   • Provide a central, customer-focused office to care for the concerns of the client, sponsor, and stakeholders
   • The PMO is the best place to launch and collect information from project reviews
   • Provide a neutral, centralized office for planning, negotiating, and analyzing projects, and for reporting throughout the enterprise.  Provide project metrics and/or a project dashboard with an enterprise, division, and department view.
3. Best-Practices and Lessons Learned Brokerage – document and collect successes and blunders.
   • Gather project experience and data for use in future projects and to improve project management methods (knowledge management)
   • Collect the best documentation and techniques from each successful project to add to your project knowledge base such as project templates, estimates, etc.
   • The PMO can also take the time to search outside the enterprise for best practices worthy of adopting internally

If you have not embraced the PMO yet, then examine what you are doing now for project management and ask if you are supporting all of the important functions listed above.

Executive Project Management Focus

Finally, to build the successful project management environment, you must add executive focus to project management through a Chief Project Officer (CPO), an Enterprise Project Manager (EPM), PMO Manager, or a senior manager/executive to support all of the functions discussed above and to lead the organization in meeting its project portfolio objectives through a PMO.

The need for focused and organized project delivery has come up time and time again in the current articles on project management.  Recently, in a survey of Chief Information Officers and Technology Officers, the CIOs and CTOs were asked: "What keeps you awake at night?" At the top of the list was "completing projects on time."

Call it any of the names or terms given for the acronym PMO above. The name really doesn't matter. What matters and what should affect the success of a project-focused organization is the development of a separate, recognized, structured organization with personnel skilled in project management.  This structure outlined above is essential if you want to have a successful project management function and to bring your projects to a successful completion. 

For most of us, project success equates to success of the enterprise. Can we afford to do less?