Project Management

1. The most challenging aspect to the PMO is creating a vision. We can see this struggle as relatable to many aspects of project initiation, when a student is creating their thesis, the most challenging aspect of the thesis is the subject. This is because (a) once a subject or a vision is found, it lays the foundation for the future phases. Why the vision is so difficult is because the PM must establish the (b) who, what, when, why and how’s; who needs to be involved, how do we start, how will we get executive sponsorship? The vision phase helps us answer questions that are needed to successfully engage in the paths of the roadmap. Once these questions are answered, we’ve laid the path for rolling out the subsequent phases.

2. According to Perry (2009), (a) “Effective and usable processes are nearly always the most significant indicator of an effective PMO”. This is an important message because process sets up the game plan for the process, after the vision has been established. For example, even though I don’t watch football, I know that the Patriots don’t just run out on the field and play football without any planning. The coach spends countless hours evaluating the team’s strengths and coming up with game plans of how to successfully execute. The exact steps outlined by the coach are delivered and expected to be followed precisely to ensure the team’s best strategy to gain a win. Having a clear, usable and concise process delivers a game plan that the group can collectively adhere to. (b) If a process isn’t established, the risk might be run of implementing tools prior to process. Even worse, there might be such a lack of clarity that it might be assumed that processes exist, even when they don’t. Another example of the football team would be if the coach gave little process, you could see how players would try to fill in the gaps with assumptions and these assumptions could be disguised as a process.

3. (a) Simply put, training comes before tooling because training is where the PMO learns. Examples are PMI courses, agile, waterfall, ERP, etc.  According to Perry (2009), “Implementing tools for the PMO is no different than implementing tools for any other part of the organization.” Thinking of this, training would come before the application and not the other way around. (b) Reasoning for the importance of training before tooling is because the cost of an untrained PMO, would make for a most likely unsuccessful tooling phase and therefore, unsuccessful PMO. Though some organisations may breeze over training because it can be viewed as an intangible cost, the cost of not doing training is much higher than the cost of the training itself because they have to learn before expected application.