EQuest Consulting

Project Management for Business Success

Project Management Offices (PMO)

“Creating smart PMOs
fosters excellence in
project management”

EQuest Consulting has set up many Project Management Offices (PMOs) for large organisations, each tailored to meet specific needs. A PMO may service a program, department or whole organisation. It can act as a centre of project management capability improvement, drive delivery, plus provide support and administration to projects.

Most organisations are now aware that expert project management is required to maintain a competitive advantage. It is the mechanism that delivers change, which is necessary to gain a competitive edge. Centralised PMOs can enable a culture of expert project management and are therefore increasingly being seen as a necessity for an organisation’s success.

Whatever the needs for your PMO, we have the expertise to set it up, manage it and support it. When setting up a PMO, we perform a needs analysis, create a PMO Charter to define its vision, role, functions and staffing, plus a roadmap to set out its development. The roadmap will deliver immediate needs and quick wins first, followed by further, prioritised functions.

The functions of a PMO depend on organisational

needs, however most now provide consultative, value-adding, services in addition to administrative services. PMOs moving from administrative to consultative models usually require cultural change in the organisation if they are to be successful.

Centralised PMOs can act as enablers to increase organisational project management capability through the maturity levels: 1 – adhoc, 2 – a structured approach, 3 – integrated processes, 4 – staff committed to PM culture, 5 – optimising. This is a journey that requires a sustained commitment over time, but will give an organisation a significant competitive edge.

PMO services can include:

Resource management, the processes and mechanisms to manage resource allocation and utilisation in multi-project, shared resource environments. This enables efficient utilisation of expensive resources.
Portfolio management, set up of processes, compilation of information and facilitation of forums to enable management to make decisions to select and review the projects and programs to best deliver their organisation’s strategy. It should consider constraints of budget, resource availability, time and organisational ability to absorb change.
Benefits realisation, developing, implementing and facilitating mechanisms to identify the outcomes needed to deliver an organisation’s strategy, and the flow of projects required to deliver those outcomes (therefore closely related to portfolio management). The PMO can track and measure changes arising from each project against the predicted outcomes or benefits. Its independence allows impartial and consistent measurement and reporting of benefits.
Management of interdependencies and constraints, a PMO can provide a holistic view of projects and programs in a portfolio, facilitating the identification of dependencies between projects and any overarching constraints. Interdependencies can be monitored by use of milestones linking project schedules.
Provision of support, providing expertise to support project managers in areas where they may lack skills, aiding in resolving issues or taking corrective action to recover under-performing projects.
Professional development of Project Managers, establishing project management career paths, ensuring project managers are allocated to projects that stretch them and arranging mentoring and training.
Health checks, increases the chances of success of a project by having an independent assessment of its conduct, with recommendations for improvements. Also ensures compliance to methodologies and standards.
Post Implementation Reviews, these enable an organisation to continually improve its project management by finding out what went well and what can be improved on projects. Allows successful strategies to be identified and replicated, and unsuccessful practices to be improved. PIRs should be conducted by a person independent of the project team.
Quality management, implementing quality assurance processes to ensure projects produce outputs that meet the needs of their recipients. This can include defining criteria for requirements gathering, facilitating check-point or stage-gate reviews of deliverables and building in checks and balances to the methodology to test outputs against requirements.

Cost management, developing processes and mechanisms to allocate budget to projects from the cost centres funding them, then capturing and tracking the costs incurred by each project through to a financial accounting system.

Project management methodology, its definition, implementation and support, covering project initiation, planning, control, execution and closure phases. Enables projects to be well defined and deliver their required outputs to time and budget expectations.

Setting standards, for example for schedule creation and tracking, cost tracking, risk and issue management, change control and quality management. This will improve efficiency and reliability of project delivery.
Project governance, creating governance standards, including lines of reporting, change control process, escalation and decision paths, regular meeting forums such as steering committees and roles of sponsors and stakeholders. A PMO can assist projects and programs to implement and administer governance, to ensure they have the right levels of management support and oversight.
Project and program reporting, defining reporting requirements, determining their content and format, implementing mechanisms and tools to enter, extract and rollup performance data and administering processes to regularly distribute reports. Reporting gives management an efficient way of gaining visibility of projects and aids communication by flagging when their support is required.
Project management tools, their selection and implementation, plus provision of training and support.

Whatever the needs for your PMO, we have the expertise to set it up, manage it or support it.

Case Studies
      Program Office Set Up and Management
      PMO Set Up and Microsoft Project 2003 Server Implementation
      Project Management Office Health Check
      Project Management and Business Analysis Capability Development

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