GovernIT

Series: Project, Program and Enterprise PMO

Over the years, the management of IT projects has evolved considerably. Project Managers managed and delivered projects, regardless of size. However, with increasing complexity of IT projects, it was becoming difficult to deliver projects on time, within budget and with acceptable quality levels.

Project Management began to be studied as a separate discipline and project management activities and skills were codified as Frameworks. Some well-known Project Management frameworks currently in use are the Project Management Institute’s PM Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and PRINCE2.

With IT receiving more attention (much negative too), standards, planning and tracking became important to organizations. Setting up standard project management practices, oversight of plans, tracking and reporting became a priority. Thus was born the Project Management Office (PMO).

Programs got their own Program Management Office and now there is the EPMO – the Enterprise Program Management Office, a corporate level PMO that sets standards for Programs across the organization.

The role of a PMO has grown so important that it is listed as one of the roles in the RACI matrix in COBIT 4.1, the commonly used framework for IT Governance.

But the basic activities/responsibilities of the PMO remain consistent in principle, if not in scale. Some of the typical PMO activities include:

• Program and Project Planning
• Tracking
• Risk Management
• Financial Management and Reporting
• Change Management
• Staffing andTraining
• Quality Management

Based on the organization, the functions of a PMO may include other activities not listed above.  It is becoming increasingly clear that using a PMO can improve the project delivery performance, provided we know where and how to use it.

In an entry at CIO.com, Jim Vaughan discusses this issue in “Developing Your Project Management Office (PMO)”

We will look at some of the activities of the PMO in more detail in the next few posts. If you have some links of blogs, articles or whitepapers that document any of these aspects or you have some links to some templates, please share them with the community. You will receive an attribution with your name and website.

Before you leave, here is a good link for you. Download TenStep’s white paper (pdf) on building a PMO

Merry Christmas

Related posts:

1. PMO Series: Quality Management
2. PMO Series: Change Management
3. PMO Series: How to Review Projects
4. Some thoughts on Risk Management