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Welcome to PMOStep Project Management
Office Framework™
The PMO Startup Service
Organizations around the world are implementing formal project management processes and disciplines to deliver their work initiatives on time, within budget and to an agreed upon level of quality. Part of the ability to execute better, faster and cheaper comes from your ability to implement common processes and practices across your entire organization.
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If you only have a couple projects going on at any one time, you may be able to gain the advantage of organizational standards by providing consistent training and having the handful of project managers following similar processes. However, the larger your organization gets, and the more projects that are executed at one time, the more difficult it becomes to enforce this organizational consistency, and without this consistency, the full value of implementing a common project management methodology is not reached. Project management is an enabler to help you implement your projects more successfully. If you are going to successfully implement project management in your organization you need to have resources that are focused on this initiative. You will need standard processes, training, coaching, support, etc. It is a long-term effort. One an organization recognizes this need to assign long-term resources to this effort, the organization should be thinking of setting up a Project Management Office (PMO). |
*** PMOStep *** PMOStep is a TenStep internal methodology. We do not license it to companies or individuals unless we are working with a company on a package of products and services. For more information about project management, please visit www.TenStep.com to see our flagship methodology. |
The PMO is simply the common name given to the resources that are allocated to the project management initiative. That is the term used in PMOStep. Other names include the Project Office, Enterprise Project Office, Project Management Center of Excellence and Project Management Resource Team. In PMOStep, all of these organizational names are referred to simply as the Project Management Office (PMO). Saying that you need a PMO does not imply that you need to have a large bureaucratic staff. The PMO could just be one person for 50% of his time. In other large organization the PMO may have 20 people or more. It all depends on the needs of the organization.
Although the concept of the Project Management Office has been around for many years, for many organizations the awareness level was raised because of the recent YR2K problems. Many companies, especially larger ones, realized that they needed a concerted and coordinated effort to ensure that their systems could withstand the YR2K cutover. The basic infrastructure of a PMO was implemented, although with a single-minded focus on coordinating projects for the YR2K fixes. After YR2K passed, many companies disbanded the infrastructure, while others realized the long-term value in continuing to coordinate some aspects of project management centrally.
There are many potential products and services that a PMO can be responsible for, depending on the needs of the organization and the vision of the PMO sponsor. Some of these organization models will be described later in PMOStep. However, before the PMO can be successful, there must be an agreement from the management team on their overall role and the general expectations they need to achieve. A typical PMO is responsible for deploying a consistent project management methodology within the organization, including processes, templates and best practices. This is not a one-time event, but a broad initiative that could cover a number of years. Some organizations set up a PMO to do much less than that. Some PMOs do that and more.
In this PMOStep framework, you will find most of what you need to successfully establish and run a PMO. Companies of all sizes can use the PMOStep Project Management Office Framework™. Smaller organizations may not utilize all of the services and features. Larger companies will be able to utilize much more. The larger and more sophisticated your organization, the more material from PMOStep you can leverage.
Before you begin to read about the PMOStep procedures, best practices and templates, take a minute first to review the following background information.
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