Starting a PMO involves several steps: 1. Identifying the need for a PMO based on signs like a lack of project transparency and high failure rates. 2. Entering a learning phase to understand current practices and benchmark against other organizations. 3. Developing or adopting a project management methodology with templates, processes, and best practices. 4. Improving the methodology over time through training, certifications, reviews, and automation. 5. Facing common problems like weak sponsorship, poor communication, and trying to do too much with too little can be overcome with best practices like showing early results and treating it as a culture change initiative.

1. STARTING A PMO
February, 2014
Eric Mukiri
www.fintech-group.com
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2. Agenda
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Identify the need
Learning phase
Develop/adopt a methodology
Improve the methodology
Automation
Common problems & best practices
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3. Defin:
PMO is group or department within a business, agency or enterprise that
defines and maintains standards for project management within the
organization.
Using established project management approaches and operating an
established PMO increases chances of project success
Some signs of the need
• A lack of project transparency
• Significant discrepancies in project results
• Poor customer-satisfaction rates
• An inability to cost projects accurately
• A high percentage of delayed or canceled projects
• High failure rates.
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4. Why need PMO?
• Consistent pjm across organization including processes, templates and
best practices.
• Efficiency to deliver faster, cheaper by way of focus and problem-solving
techniques
• Builds the methodology and updates it as needed to account for
improvements and best practices. Improve the methodology
• improved project team communications by having common processes,
deliverables, and terminology
• Provides training (internal or outsourced) to build core project
management competencies and a common set of experiences
• Delivers project management coaching services to keep projects from
getting into trouble
• Tracks basic information on the current status of all projects in the
organization, and provides project visibility to management in a common
and consistent manner.
• Measuring projects performance metrics as source information for
continuous improvement
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5. Learning experience
• This is major change: buy-in must come from the top and appoint the
responsible change agent.
• Have a mix of functional and project management knowledge
• What are we doing right? Don’t discard it (organization process assets)
• Whom do we want to benchmark: ie. Competition, partners, customers,
respectable organisations
• Learn from the benchmarked organisations ie. Seek the training, seminars,
etc.
• Decide which methodology to use by way of one of:
-build afresh?
-Buy an existing one
-buy and customize to your need
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6. Implementing the methodology
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Have dedicated owner
Control the staff cost, e.g. part-time projects staff from functional units**
Customise or adopt few but core templates and processes to use
Decide which methodology to use by way of one of:
a)build afresh?
b)Buy an existing one ie. outsource the implementation
c)buy and customize to your need
** we chose c. by borrowing ideas from various partners)
• Have few but adequate templates for each of the process groups ie.
Initiation, planning, executing, monitoring-controlling and closing
e.g. initiating: project initiation doc
Planning: schedule, test plan, training plan
Executing: issues log, change requests, impact analysis
M&C: Minutes, weekly status report, meetings (physical/conference call)
Closing: sign-offs, hand-over report, post-live tracking, financial closure (very
key)
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7. Implementing the methodology
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8. Improving the methodology
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Training and individuals certifications e.g. PMP
Specialised staff e.g. project managers, project admin
Organisational certification e.g. ISO 9001:2008
Review what doesn’t work and change it
Empowering the PMO to make decisions e.g. resources selection,
staff motivation costs
• Set and measure against performance targets e.g.
monthly/quarterly
• Automation of PMO e.g MS Projects Central as single repository of
projects records
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9. Automation with MS Projects Central
Key features
• Quick snapshot dashboard of all projects
• Status Reporting : Possible to design status reports templates
• Task creation: Allows project resources to add new tasks, hence bottom-up
scheduling possible.
• Task progress updates: Users update the task hours/% work done, e-mail is
sent to the project manager.
• Task delegation: When feature enabled, resource can assign another a task,
with auto e-mail notification to project manager.
• Presentation features : Quick one-stop-shop view of the projects including
upcoming tasks.
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook- combining projects tasks with Outlook for
single calendar view
• Can see the staff assigned/available hours in a period.
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10. Projects view
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11. Resource tasks view
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12. Resource assignment view
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13. Common Problems
•Setting up processes and expecting everyone to
follow them
•Expecting everyone in the PMO to be an expert
•Not creating a support organization
•Poor communication
•Weak sponsorship
•Trying to do too much with too little
•Focusing on PMO activities and not value
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14. Best practices
• Treat as a culture change initiative
• Resistance to change is normal
• Be aware of logical and emotional resistance
• Show some results as quickly as possible
• Treat implementation as a process and a
project(s)
• Sponsor at highest level
• Be open to new ideas from the organization
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15. Fyi – Fintech ICT & bus. solutions
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16. Solutions, elaborated
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