Atekpc Project Management office Case

ISSUES

According to the AtekPC Project Management Office case, the purpose of a PMO is to fulfil the need for greater discipline in managing IT projects. Moreover, it establishes or enhances project management skills, process, and governance structures within an organization. The director of Application Development, Richard Steinberg, described AtekPC’s PMO’s purpose as a “methodology” for managing projects with standardized practices. As stated within the case, the main purpose of the PMO is to provide standardization in managing projects of large, complex scales as well as gain improvements in planning and performance of initiatives. The case generalizes the purpose of the PMO as the realization of the benefits derived from consistent project practices. With certain recurring elements, therefore the purpose of a PMO (from the context of the AtekPC case) is to improve the efficient use of management skills, processes, and authority architecture with complex projects by standardizing decision making, with respect to the company’s core competencies. The secondary mission of a PMO is more specific than its purpose. In this case, there are multiple missions assigned to the PMO of AtekPC, though they are not finalized. The first mission, which is a short term goal, is cost reduction, where the PMO uses IT to play the support role as well as the factory role, since projects at AtekPC have increasingly become more focused on operations and maintenance in an overriding effort to improve efficiencies within the business function and the second mission, in a more long term outlook, is to become more creative, adaptive, and agile in launching new products, which indicates a strategic role of IT usage.

The PC industry was changing, and AtekPC was busy dealing with intense pressure from larger competitors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. To compete in a changing industry in which partnership was occurring, AtekPC had implemented a corporate planning office. They recognized the role that IT would likely play in equipping ATEKPC to respond to the industry pressures which is why the senior vice-president had supported the creation of PMO within IT.

In mature organizations, the PMO is the central point for improvement in project management through the implementation of the company-orientated functions. The intended outcome of this is to boost the overall capacity of AtekPC for long-range benefits. These company functions were meant to provide long-term stability and backbone for the project management success. Establishing, and maintaining a project historical database, generally achieves this mission. Also, by creating and disseminating project management best practices, by providing training in all project management knowledge areas, and by providing visibility for the value of project management to the organization.

Two different models of PMO came into play with AtekPC, which were PMO-Heavy and PMO-Light. PMO-Heavy meant a full staff of project managers had to be responsible for all IT projects while PMO-Light meant minimal staff of experts would work through internal project managers to execute the responsibilities of PMO

There seemed to be a lack of leadership in the organization as the manufacturing systems manager (Gardner) wanted to maintain control of projects and assign a project manager from the PMO to follow his direction. Naturally, this caused tension within the company and to add to that issue, the heavy and light PMO models created even more tension and there ended up being no effective means of measuring performance.