Project Partners Blog

A Project Management Office (PMO) is a group within an organization that defines and maintains standards for project management.  A PMO generally bases its project management principles, practices and processes on some kind of industry standard methodology such as PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) or PRINCE2 (Project in Controlled Environments).

Over time, a PMO generally will become the source for guidance, documentation, and metrics related to the practices involved in managing and implementing projects within the organization.

There was a study conducted that provided the flowing statistics:

• Organizations with PMOs complete twice as many projects than those without PMOs.

• High-performing organizations outsource 135 percent more than low performing organizations.

• 76 percent of recently surveyed companies reported that they had created a PMO, and the longer the PMO had been in operation, the more project success rates improved.

• Those with a PMO operating for more than four years reported a 65 percent success rate increase.

• The top two reasons for establishing a PMO are improving project success rates and implementation of standard practices.

• 65.8 percent of high performing organizations have enterprise PMOs.

• PMOs can deliver a return in three to six months by providing the visibility needed to cancel, postpone, or scale back unnecessary or less strategic projects.

• As PMOs mature, they are significantly better at meeting critical success factors, including having effective sponsorship, accountability, competent staff, quality leadership and demonstrated value.

• The top two issues for PMOs are forecasting the need for resources and resolving resource conflicts.

To have a successful PMO Office the following dimensions need to be evaluated and followed.

1.        Benefits:  collective visibility for estimating and tracking financial and strategic project benefits

2.       Selection:  the scalability, clarity and quality of project funding practices

3.       Issues, Risks and Dependencies:  issue escalation and resolution, aggregate risk management, and “air traffic control” over project inter-dependencies

4.       Change Control:  a practical level of business value protection and visibility

5.       Project Planning:  a repeatable, scalable framework for organizing project effort that uses common metrics and deliverables

6.       Financial Visibility:  a financial information framework that incorporates control and accountability without excessive data manipulation

7.       Communication and Reporting:  a procedural and  technical platform to collaborate on deliverables, coordinate schedules and resources, and effectively collect and use standardized project health metrics

8.       Training:  a set of training materials and standards to promote fundamental project management skills, enabled by automated workflows to simplify procedural gate-keeping

9.       Quality:  the criteria for deliverables quality, and the process for monitoring this quality

You are implementing Primavera P6 and have determined that the delivered reporting tools are not up to snuff.  Before you go out and buy a new report writing tool, take a step back and look in your enterprise toolbox.  You might find you already have a tool that fits the bill.

At Iberdrola Renewables, we have a large contingent of data consumers who need read-only access to project information stored in Primavera.  P6 has proved to be a great and flexible tool for managing vast amounts of project metadata.   Through the configuration of Project Codes, Project UDFs, and Project Layouts in P6 we have streamlined the process of managing project pipeline data and have greatly enhanced data quality.  However, the licensing cost and training effort to get dozens of read-only users access to that information in P6 was disconcerting.  What was needed was a simple to use tool to provide a read-only view of the pipeline data to the casual user. 

To a reporting tool, data is data.  Org Publisher (from Aquire) is a tool designed and marketed to chart and display employee and human resource records via an intuitive browser interface.  At its core, the tool is architected to display hierarchically structured data brought in from any ODBC data source.  As the Project Pipeline data stored in Primavera P6 is also structured hierarchically, via the Enterprise Project Structure (EPS), this was a natural fit.

After creating a custom view that managed the necessary joins to pull a few dozen fields from a half a dozen tables into a single row per project, the Primavera data was ready to be pulled into Org Publisher.  The Org Publisher tool provides multiple views of the data including a graphical Chart View (displaying relationships between records), a Summary View (for Counts and Totaling), a Profile View (to view all data associated to a single record) and a List View (to view all data in spreadsheet layout including download to Excel capability).  Once created, the chart and views were scheduled to refresh nightly and were made available through a web browser on the Intranet.  Below is a sample:

Besides the obvious licensing cost savings associated with not purchasing another tool, there are other advantages to adapting and re-using existing technology.  End users will be thrilled not to be forced to have to learn yet another new tool, easing adoption.  Additionally, the technical resources responsible for supporting the tool will be ready to go even before day one.

Objectives

The aim of a global implementation is to have structured streamlined process flows across lines of business with local requirements seamlessly incorporated within it. Companies usually create a global template which is rolled out at every site.

Business Process re-engineering must be done across all sites to standardize the processes per the global template and identify local variations. People need to be convinced to work across the globe and cooperate with one another to implement a standard set of business applications. This requires full commitment and continuous encouragement from the top management.

Critical success factors include standardized business process flows, structured communication plans and processes occurring across time zones, common discussion forums for global teams and a continuous robust control and change management process which incorporates various global feedback streams. It is advisable to have a phased sequential implementation where the company allows the new system to stabilize, adequate training plans to educate users on the new system and cater to any issues pertaining to local regulations.

It is highly essential to define a workplan for the implementation with milestones for every global site. It pays to select a dedicated, knowledgeable and resourceful team that can understand the organization needs and maintain focus on achieving planned benefits. This core central team will have to travel across global sites for introducing the global template.

Roles

A key role in any global implementation is the implementation Sponsor. The implementation Sponsor (sometimes referred to as the Champion) is an executive who has a stake in the success of the implementation and sits on the Steering Committee. Global key stakeholders are represented on the implementation Steering Committee. The Steering Committee makes final decisions and provides guidance and communication to the implementation team.

The implementation team needs to be structured so that key stakeholders across the enterprise are represented and have a say in the decision-making process. Global Process Owners (GPOs) are local representatives who report to the Steering Committee. GPOs provide direction to the Process Lead from their division or area. Process Leads collaborate and are empowered to make process change decisions that conform to the global template. Process Leads work with the Technical Team to implement the new processes.

The GPOs provide regular updates to the Steering Committee on the overall progress of the workplan and identify any issues that need to be resolved. In the event the Steering Committee cannot reach a consensus on an unresolved issue, the Sponsor has the final say.

Data and Costs

It is important to harmonize the data to generate global economies of scale and also provide a degree of freedom to customize it for local requirements. There should be standardization of interfaces across sites and a uniform data management strategy. If a company is too large in size, then a single central server and network fail to handle the huge volume of transactions. So the company needs to ensure that the communication and data management systems are in line to meet the future flow of data as dictated by the global template. A proper data backup and maintenance system needs to be in place.

Some of the key global ERP implementation costs need to be kept in view while structuring the implementation. Travel, training, documentation translations, advanced telecommunication system, robust data storages mechanisms with high availability systems and consultancy fees are some of the key cost heads.

Conclusion

Structuring a global implementation involves defining your objectives, getting the right resources to deliver on those objectives, without negatively impacting your data or overrunning costs. Well run implementations take all of these factors into consideration at the earliest planning stages to avoid those ‘surprises’ that can take the implementation off track.