Why Do we need a better Project Management Office…
We already have a pretty good set of project management tools, and we’ve decided to do a lot more sharing of information between offices coming from different departments. As you can find on prince2 elearning foundation course.
As well, we’ve established an upper management level get acquainted session for next years’ project stakeholders. We’ve also decided to professionally model the new corporate approach to project managers, while keeping it very resourceful and project-centric.
The project management office is responsible for the building the project management knowledge portfolio for PMs and for providing them with advanced information, structure, and business-driven tools. The office is also responsible for building a robust new Setting Up and Managing Your Projects (SMAP) model for corporate management.
This is not merely a logo, it’s about an approach to project management best practices and a methodology for visual organization of best practices in the “real world”.
The challenge is to produce a portfolio of a dozen best practice platforms, and include them in the corporate approach to project management. Where have these solutions come in?
As we’ve started our new project portfolio, we’ve taken a similar approach to create a portfolio organization for project portfolio management best practices.
From pre-determined criteria,”- portfolio consistency”- we’ve substituted the following:
Our challenge is to make sure these best practice portfolios don’t confine themselves to the project portfolio, the Exchange, or maybe certain specific projects, since they’ll just naturally die out.
That’s how the new project portfolio organization has been built, and how the revised set of best practices has come to the attention of the entire company, and shown us that the entire company business case for project portfolio management is well-founded.
Best practices must reflect business priorities, just like in any business portfolio, yet have a different content and format. The objective, here, is to ask “what kind of tools, how and when” is the right approach to these best practices across businesses in different industries and industries on the same assignment.
We’re not trying to repackage portfolio best practices to provide a solution to every project, just to provide a good fit to the verticals we’re involved in. With the?), portfolio optimization is no longer a fuel which appears precious after all, it’s a business imperative which a structured and disciplined approach to project portfolio management is.
Value of using best practices is not a medication – identify which set of best practice items are important for businesses in different industries, and put more effort and resources in order to build the organization to support it.
We’ve established a portfolio of web-based best practices, which is constantly being updated by the project management community. They can be found on web sites on the Internet or on project management blogs, in the company Intranet, and even in meeting minutes.”We started with a very small number of best practice dashboards, but as we’ve been able to find new tools and learnings, we’ve expanded the set of web-based best practices to fit the needs of pretty much every company in different industries and situations. The key is recognizing the need for a portfolio of best practices and putting in the effort to collect the ones that apply to your business and fit your goals.
We’re taking on the responsibility to analyze the business needs of the individual projects and the projects in the portfolio, and then building the portfolio to meet those needs.
We’re building one best practice release per year, and we’re focusing on ensuring that all projects in the portfolio are able to benefit from this release, it’s now become our standard for release.
We make sure that no other companies are building their own solutions or implementing their own solutions to the best practice set that our project manager has gathered and made available to them.”
“We’re increasingly focused on best practices rather than the popular jargon surrounding PM methodology. Where real change for effectiveness comes from behavioral change, the improvement of processes and tools within the organization, not from an internal or external ‘best practices’ list,”
“We’re creating a consistent methodology for best practices that we can apply across the organization, empowering the organization to build the business case for change and driving the company outside of its silos and ‘best practices’ vs. just doing more ‘stuff’ with ‘best practices’ aligned with ‘best practice logic’ (there’s a gap there somewhere”).
