The document discusses the importance of establishing a Project Management Office (PMO) within an organization. A PMO can help minimize project risks and uncertainties by standardizing processes, clarifying roles, developing methodologies and best practices, and monitoring projects. It describes four key information systems that a PMO can use to capture project data on earned value, risks, failures, and lessons learned. Establishing a strong PMO can help executives make better strategic decisions by providing more meaningful project information and reports.

1. Keep Calm and Call the PMO
A common test, for secondary school’s kids, is: « In a pond a water-lily doubles its
leaves every day and it takes 30 days for them to cover completely the pond's
surface. When shall the root of the lily be cut in order to save the half of the pond
from being totally covered? »… The obvious answer is… at the 29th day.
In-depth, the meaning of the test, which also had the purpose to introduce the
concept of exponential trend, is that certain action must be undertaken at a very
specific point in time, pending the possibility to achieve the task(s) that, through
said action, is supposed to be achieved.
In our days, due to financial constraints imposed by the need of being
competitive, associated with a lengthier decision making process, it often results
in undertakings which success is highly in danger due to:
• Limited time frame allocated to the implementation,
• Modifications and changes that most likely are to be made during the
implementation,
• Severe negative impact due to budget overruns.
As market and organizational forces are unlikely to be changed, the projects and
the whole quality portfolio, have then to be thoroughly planned (setting clear
priorities) and the progress constantly and consistently monitored (allocating
appropriate resources with their distinctive capabilities), thus the uncertainty
about their chances of success is minimized if not nullified.
As many of you know the general accepted definition of Project is: - A project is a
temporary Endeavour designed to produce a unique product, service or result with
a defined start and finish date (usually is time-constrained and often constrained
by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives. – The
logic consequence is to mandatory ascertain intimately:

2. • What makes up my entire project?
• What is my project time frame?
• How much the project is going to cost?
• What are risks and/or opportunities that project is going to face?
To give an answer to these questions, any Organization should have a strong
project management understanding (which is implying a profound knowledge, at
any hierarchical level, of the Company’ Strategy, embedded in its Vision, Mission
and Values) of the applications of distinctive capabilities to meet or possibly
exceed stakeholder(s) requirements and expectations.
Therefore, when an Organization will be fully aware of the importance of the
project management professionalism, and providentially this is happening in
more and more Companies, this will lead to recognize the importance of having
in place a Project Management Office (PMO). Why? Because the PMO would have
the accountability for supervising all critical activities related to project
management, as such:
• Data standardization (estimating, planning, scheduling, control and
reporting),
• Clarification of PM roles and responsibilities,
• Preparation of job description,
• Preparation of PM templates,
• Develop PM methodologies,
• Lessons- Learned data archive,
• Constant PM benchmarking,
• Identify PM standards and best practices,
• Performing strategic planning for PM,
• Establish a Project-Solving channel,
• Transferring knowledge through coaching and mentorship,
• Develop a corporate resources capacity/utilization plan,
• Assessing project risks,
• Planning for disaster recovery in projects, and
• Performing and/or participating in the Portfolio management of projects.
When these concepts and the consequent changes will be implemented in the
Company organization, this will bring Organizations to start considering the
PMO as Center of Excellence (COE) in project management. The COE therefore, is

3. becoming accountable for providing vital information to stakeholders rather
than executing projects.
The general practice foreseen the presence of three common types of Project
Office (PO):
• Functional PO, which has the major responsibility to manage critical
resources staff and may manage project when required.
• Customers Group PO, which has the responsibility to better, manage
customers and customer communication.
• Finally Corporate or Strategic PO, which will service the entire organization
and will focus on corporate and strategic matters rather than functional
issues.
Of course, Companies can establish more than one PO at the same time. It is
common practice to have simultaneously both Functional PO and a
Strategic/Corporate PO, providing they are working together to manage
multiple/conflicting priorities that would possibly arise.
Thus, the PO is providing vital information to stakeholders and to do this must
exist a processes and tools for capturing this information. This can be done
collecting information from four Information System, as shown in the picture
below
- Earned Value Info. System (EVIS) - It’s familiar to almost all Project Manager
and provides sufficient information to answer the questions: where is the Project
today? And where the project will end up? The system captures the planned and
actual value of the work, the actual cost, the cost & schedule variances, the
estimated cost a completion, the estimated time at completion, percentage
complete and trends. However, the EVIS has no provision to measure Project
Quality. Therefore, if it is possible for EVM to report that a Project is under
budget, ahead of Schedule and the scope fully executed. Yet, due to endless
reasons, the project has unhappy Client and ultimately unsuccessful results. This
will lead to the other fundamental question that has to be answered: What are

4. the reasons behind the actual situation? And moreover, what are the
recommendations for what actions should take to gain project goals?
- Risk Management Info. System (RMIS) – This system provide data on risk
management. It stores and allows retrieval of risk related data for creating
reports and serves as the storage for all current and historical information
related to project risk. The system would include risk identification
documentation (in a dedicated template), quantitative and qualitative risk
assessment documents, contract deliverables if required and any other risk
related reports. Using Risk Management templates, each project will be able to
produce a set of standard reports for periodic reporting and have the ability to
create customized reports, in response to special queries.
- Performance Failure Info. System (PFIS) – This system captures a complete
project failure or simply the failure of certain tasks within the project. The PFIS
must identify the causes of the failures and possibly the recommendation for the
removal of the causes. As stated before the PO has the responsibility to develop
standards for maintaining the PFIS more than for validating a failure. The
validation is the responsibility of the Team members performing the work.
Failure reporting can imply the discovery of additional and maybe more serious
problems. As such: a) there may be strong resistance to report some failure for
fear that it may reflect poorly on the personnel associated with the failure, for
example the project sponsor/leader; b) each division of a large company may
have own procedures for recording failures and may will be strongly averse to
make the failure visible in a corporate database; c) could exist many different
definitions of what is or is not a failure; d) the PO may be subjected to others
“benevolence” for providing accurate, timely and complete information. The
failure report has to identify the items failed, symptoms, and conditions at the
time of the failure and any other pertinent evidence necessary for corrective
actions to be taken. The failure analysis, which is the systematic analysis of the
consequences of a failure, cannot be completed until the causes of the failure
have been completely identified. Therefore, the PO may simply function as the
records keeper to standardize a corporate-wide format and database for
reporting the results of each project.
- Lessons Learned Info. System (LLIS) – This system is based on “post-
mortem” project analysis. It is important for capturing all the valuable
information to be used for improving standards, the estimating for future
bidding and the way in which the business is been conducted. All of these data
must be captured for future use. Basically, in a “post-mortem” analysis meeting,
the following questions must be answered: First - What the project did it right?
Second - What the project did it wrong? Third - What future recommendations
can be made? Fourth - How, when, and to whom should the information be
disseminated?
Let me close this article with some consideration regarding two aspects that I
trust very important, Mentoring and Project Management Benchmarking.
- Mentoring – Mentoring is a critical PO activity. Many wise people believe that
the best way to train someone in project management is “hands-on-job” training.
Practically, this way imply for inexperienced project manager, to work directly
under the guidance of a senior project manager, essentially on large project.
There is another choice, maybe less expensive, especially for those companies,
which don’t have a constant flow of large project; this choice would be for PO to

5. taking up the mentoring role whereby inexperienced project manager can seek
advice and guidance from more experienced project manager who are reporting
to the PO. In this way there are multiple benefits: a) sometimes the line manager
to whom the project manager is reporting administratively, may not have the
necessary project management knowledge or experience for assisting the
employee in times of trouble; c) the project manager may not wish to discuss
some critical issue with his/her superiors for the fear of career implication; d) is
a matter of fact that PO has the responsibility for maintaining lessons-learned
files, the project mentoring program could exploit these files and provide to the
inexperienced project manager early warning indicators concerning potential
problems that could occur. The mentoring program could be done on full-time
basis or on as-needed basis.
- Benchmarking – Just like mentoring, benchmarking is a very useful,
interesting and difficult activity assigned to the PO. It requires the cooperation of
experienced project manager and is directly related to strategic planning for
project management. It can have a huge impact on the corporate bottom line
based upon how quickly the changes are implemented. It is a common use,
especially for large companies, the use of third party firms, which function is
entirely devoted to benchmarking. These organization conduct symposium
where project management best practices data are shared and in addition they
supply to a company a database services used to compare: a) other organization
in the same industry, b) other organizations in different industry sectors, c)
other organization by company size, d) other organization by project size, and e)
other employee responses within your company. Many organizations may have
strong resistance to benchmarking, because of fear of what will be found and the
consequent recommended changes to be implemented
- Conclusion – I believe that many executives are facing this critical question:
“How I can effectively measure the ROI (return on investment) as result of setting
up and implementing a PO?” Well, I trust the actual measurement can be
described in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Qualitatively, the executives
can look for the number of conflicts, which are escalating to the executive level
for resolution. Having an effective PO acting as filter very few conflicts would
escalate to their level. Quantitatively, the executive can assess, for example, to: a)
how through the PO standardization efforts, the Progress reviews are quicker
and more meaningful; b) how more meaningful are the decision making process;
c) with the PO much more effective information are available, and therefore, the
executives can spend less time in meeting and focusing on strategic matter
rather than operational issues; d) with a PO and standardization, executives will
have all the necessary information to make timely decisions.
I trust I have made it clear now that the responsibility of middle-level and lower-
level management is to taking care of operational matters; instead of, the
responsibility of the PO is to act as a bridge between all these levels and facilitate
for all company’s levels the accomplishment of their goals and objectives.
Thus, keep calm and call the PMO.

6. About the Author:
Renzo Streglio is Accomplished and versatile professional
with more than 30 years of Project Control Management
experience on Oil & Gas mega-billion dollar projects. He has
collaborated with major Oil & Gas Companies (ENI Group,
ExxonMobil, Shell, SLNG) as well with global Engineering &
Construction Firms (Foster Wheeler, Technip, Hyundai E&C,
Samsung E&C, Tecnicas Reunidas, Chiyoda).