

Pick a time of week for the grocery shopping and errands.Ī PMO drives a company to more efficient project management by doing things such as: Set up lawn sprinklers on an automatic timer. Heads of household will establish rules and processes for the family, such as: -Set children's curfew or sleep hours -Look at factors to determine which purchases to make (for example, "Should we buy a car, fix the roof, or go on vacation this year?").
#Establishing a project office drivers#
One of these might involve determining drivers for selecting which projects to move forward on given a set budget (portfolio analysis). The PMO looks at current processes and workflows, and finds a method of automating them through the project management tool being implemented. Increase the amount they are saving for retirement. Heads of the household might need to plan to reduce risk: -Determine insurance needs for health. The PMO is responsible for setting up a system to handle risk management. The PMO helps to create project collaboration sites and customize them to best suit the needs of the site users.įamily members will need a forum in which they can collaborate, such as: -Posting important events on a wall calendar in the kitchen -Talking to each other daily at the dinner table.

This way it is easy to know who can be scheduled for what. It helps to show everyone's work and school schedule, and availability, on a central family calendar. If someone can't do their usual task, you need to know who is available to take their place. This can include: -Who will pick up children from school today, walk the dog in the evenings, cook dinner, etc. People in the family will need to know who's doing what. It also provides guidance and best practices for resource management. The PMO creates processes to get the right data to the project management system to provide status at a project level to project managers. Yearly doctor visits to determine family member's health. Monthly bank statements to show the status of finances. The heads of the household will need information on how things are going: -Quarterly reports on children's studies. This might involve researching reporting needs, moving required data to the system, and establishing workflows to ensure that the data required for recurring reports makes it to the system in time. The PMO helps to establish an efficient way to deliver information to project stakeholders through project status and health reports. Still confused? Let's take a step back and use an example that people can relate to - how a head of household might take care of their own family: Need Simplifying project management for the organization's users by automating processes into the tool.Ĭreating policies, procedures and best practices around project management functions.īeing the project management subject matter experts by serving as a 'Center of Excellence' for all things project management, and providing training on project management best practices and tools.īeing empowered by executive sponsorship to make and enforce change through their recommendations. The common goals of all PMOs, however, would include:ĭriving and evangelizing the project management system adoption.

In small or medium businesses, a PMO can range from a single person to a small group of people, but can also scale to try to address the same issues as in large businesses. In larger companies, a PMO can consist of a department that deals with project management issues across the organization, such as project management governance, implementation, training, researching project management needs, or determining the best way to build useful reports. The person or group that creates and manages these rules of project management is sometimes referred to as the Project Management Office (PMO). Organizations who have been most successful with using Project Online in addressing business problems such as these are the ones that create a set of standards, processes, and best practices for the way that projects are managed in their organization.

I want more robust way to track project data than using Excel spreadsheets. I want to easily track the time people are spending on their tasks. I need a better way of managing my resources and assigning them to projects. My executives want better visibility into project status. How are you are planning to use it, or a better way of putting it, what's the business problem you are trying to solve? Some of the examples might be: So you're planning to adopt Project Online into your business.
