Early in the life cycle of any process, there are always the early adopters who stumble onto it and are eager to give it a chance. Their enthusiasm may prove to be contagious, and soon others begin using the process, too. At some point, senior management begins to take notice because the various ways of understanding of the process is creating problems. Not everyone understands the process the same way, and there are many levels of expertise with the tool — while some misuse it, others don't take its use seriously.
If this sounds like the history of project management in your organization, you have plenty of company. Senior management instinctively knew they needed to do something about the problem, and the first reaction was to send people away for some project management training. Usually the choice of training was made by the appropriate middle manager. There was no coordination or integration across business units. Every business unit was doing their own thing (Maturity Level 1) with little thought of standardization or enterprise-wide process design and implementation. This by itself didn't result in much improvement.
As a further attempt to solve the problem, senior management introduced some standards and common metrics found in project management. A project management process was crafted and introduced with a lot of fanfare. All were expected to use it. Some did, some didn't (Maturity Level 2). Some still held on to their old ways and managed projects the way they had been doing it all along. While all of this was going on, projects continued to be executed. There were often so many projects under way simultaneously and so much confusion that management recognized that the problem had not gone away. More dramatic action was needed. There was no way to manage across projects within the organization because of redundancy, wasted resources, and the lack of managed standards, and there was no leadership in making project management an asset to the organization. Effective project management was a recognized need in the organization, but most organizations were a long way away from satisfying that need. Senior management held high expectations that by having a standardized project management methodology, the success rate of projects would increase. Considerable effort was spent getting a methodology designed, documented, and installed, but somehow it had little impact on project success rates. In fact, it was a big disappointment. Senior management realized that having a methodology wasn't sufficient. Something more was needed, and soon that something appeared: the Project Support Office (PSO). Project Management Office (PMO) is the name commonly given this organization, but I prefer PSO. The PSO created an opportunity to put an organizational entity in place that ensured compliance (prerequisite to attaining Maturity Level 3). Project success would surely follow. Indeed, the PSO functions like an insurance policy to protect the adoption and spread of the methodology.
There are at least four reasons why an organization would choose to implement a PSO. They are as follows:
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