Is your organization experiencing growth and are your customers or leaders expecting a higher caliber of project management? Is your organization suffering from a lack of a structured approach to project management or do you find that your project scope always changes, and that chaos is the system of the day?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then your organization needs to consider conceiving a PMO.
A Project Management Office (PMO) is an organizational entity which maintains procedures and standards that ensure project completion within its intended scope, time, budget and quality metrics.
Benefits of a PMO:
• Return on Investment (ROI): The likely hood of project schedule and budget delays is minimized, the scope of the work becomes clearer and the organization can save costs as a result of less scope rework, poor collection of requirements and ineffective budgeting and scheduling.
• Lessons Learned: Project lessons learned will be captured, categorized and centralized, to be easily retrievable for usage and recommendations on future projects; this minimizes the chances or repeating mistakes.
• Consistency in Managing Projects: The PMO provides a framework for consistently managing projects through a standard methodology while ensuring projects are aligned with corporate goals and strategies.
• Empowered & Knowledgeable Staff: Standardization of project management leads to better organizational communication, reduced project risks, improved resource management, more accountability, improved quality and better forecasting.
• Higher Customer Satisfaction: The PMO will ensure that each project takes extreme care in documenting customer requirements. The documentation of assumptions and constraints will lead to a positive customer experience where he feels that his needs are analyzed and understood. Proper collection of project requirements will result in smaller numbers of change requests and greater scope integrity.