The International Community for Project Managers (ICPM)

The role of the Project Office is to enable companies to be consistently successful with respect to project management and to create a foundation for achieving a competitive advantage. This is accomplished by filling two essential roles within the organization as: 1) A provider of enterprise-level project management services, and 2) A project management center of excellence. Both of these roles are discussed below.

Despite difficulties, companies have developed and implemented powerful knowledgebased strategies because knowledge is an asset. Investing in knowledge assets is tricky. Nevertheless, companies need to have a knowledge pool to fight competition and win. In many service industries, the ability to identify best practices and spread them across a dispersed network of locations is a key driver of value. Such a strategy can create powerful brands that are continually refreshed by the knowledge of how to serve customers better. In such circumstances, it may be impossible to tell whether the value has been created by the brand or by knowledge. The two are inseparable. McKinsey defines a four-step method to identify and implement a knowledge strategy:

Improvement means performance enhancement and can be achieved by improving one of the many characteristics of the product or process. Improving performance by improving design is one way of achieving enhanced performance. For a typical high-volume manufactured product, manufacturers aim to reduce the variability of the product. In the process of quality checks, they improve its acceptance levels. The focus is on improving performance by reducing defects and non-conformities.

Project Management Offices (PMO's) are great organizations, and many companies are looking to implement them to help deliver projects more successfully. However, there are almost as many models for a PMO as there are companies implementing them. The first thing to recognize is that there is no right or wrong way to implement a PMO. The bigger question to ask first is what value does your company intend to receive from the PMO? What is the mission and vision, and what are the goals and objectives of the PMO? Some PMO’s are a center of excellence where all the project managers are assigned. In other companies, the PMO is responsible for setting project management standards, processes, and a consistent set of templates and tools. In other organizations, they maintain overall status on all active projects. There are other models as well. In general, PMO’s are most common in large companies, but there are some enlightened smaller companies that also use them.