The Atekpc Pmo Case Study Analysis

The AtekPC Project Management Office

The case study depicts AtekPC’s endeavor to implement a Project Management Office (PMO) and the struggles that they had gone through. Issues were defining the mission and purpose of a PMO, the structure and governance mechanisms and how to implement it successfully in accordance with AtekPC’s culture without any resistance. One of the challenges AtekPC was facing is determining the adequate allocation of resources dedicated to the PMO in implementing this new project. Also, the shortage of PMO experts available to be a part of the project depicts how the internal culture is like. Unlike their prospective old times, the problem that the market was facing at that time was the decrease in sales and profitability as the PC market matures. The market was experiencing difficulties because of the low demand due to advent of new technologies such as smartphones, personal PDA’s, and web-based applications. Despite of the fact that the PC market kept lowering the cost of distribution, the competition among PC manufacturers increased rapidly. Such factors forced AtekPC to expand their scope to PMO. The purpose of implementing the PMO is to provide standardization in managing projects and to get improvements in planning and performance. PMO can help AtekPC by improving the project management skills, process, and governance structures. PMO is the project-focused and enterprise-oriented tool. The enterprise purpose is to provide a long-term stability and backbone for the project management's success. This mission can be met by forming and maintaining a project historical database, developing project management best practices, and providing training in all project management knowledge areas. The missions of PMO is reducing cost and eventually making the company more creative, adaptive, and responsive in launching new products. John Strider, CIO for AtekPC, was concerned about the issues that implementing PMO had already risen and tried to move slowly so that it does not violate the company’s culture. Unfortunately, there is little shared understanding of the challenges of implementing a PMO. Therefore, managers and their organizations have inadequate guidance to help them identify and overcome the obstacles they are likely to encounter. One of the main obstacles in implementing a PMO was that a formal documentation and plans for PMO did not exist. There was a shortage of PMO expert resources. The major problem that AtekPC had was which one is more adequate between PMO-Heavy and PMO-light model.

The critical structure of the PMO is the organizational strategy based vs. departmental based. A PMO which is based throughout an organization rather than a PMO which is based on department-level is more likely to get the support from the senior executive. In other words, project management should not be a departmental strategy; it should rather be an organizational strategy. PMO’s are more effective and can have better impact on the bottom line, when they are operating at the corporate enterprise-wide strategic level. The Enterprise PMO will oversee the management of all strategically aligned projects. This leads us to the selection between the two PMO models which are heavy vs. light. One of the heavy issues is that AtekPC does not have enough people and resources to move as fast as they would want to. Another issue is that no management wants to move to the PMO - people in the department challenge the values of PMO what definitely comes from the close-minded culture of the organization. The characteristics and comparison of two models are as follow: