Defining a Project Support Office
,Several varieties of PSOs are in use in contemporary organizations. Each serves a different purpose. Before you can consider establishing a PSO in your organization, you have to understand these differences. The purpose of this section is to describe those variations and ascertain what form is best suited for your organization. A good working definition of a Project Support Office is as follows:
A Project Support Office (PSO) is a temporary or permanent organizational unit that provides a portfolio of services to support project teams that are responsible for a specific portfolio of projects.
The next three sections look at each of the major components of the PSO definition.
Temporary or Permanent Organizational Unit
Among the various forms of PSOs, some are temporary structures and some are permanent. That determination is made based on the types of projects that they support, as follows:
Temporary — PSOs that are temporary are usually called Program Offices, and they provide the administrative and other support needs of a group of projects that are related by purpose or goal. When those projects are completed, the Program Office is disbanded. Many government projects have Program Offices affiliated with them. They are generally long-term arrangements and involve millions or billions of dollars of funding.
Permanent — PSOs that are permanent are called by various names, as discussed in the “Naming the Project Support Office” section later in the chapter. The first name that you are probably familiar with is Project Management Office (PMO). These early versions of the PSO provided a range of support services for projects grouped by organizational unit, rather than goal or purpose. The IT Department was the first functional unit the PMO was attached to and remains the primary application area.
Portfolio of Services
In a recent survey of 502 PMOs, Brian Hobbs and Monique Aubry identified 27 functions that the surveyed PMOs provided.1 I've taken those 27 functions and grouped them into the six service areas that I recommend as follows:
- Project Support
- Report project status to upper management
- Provide advice to upper management
- Participate in strategic planning
- Identify, select, and prioritize new projects
- Manage archives of project documentation
- Manage one or more portfolios
- Manage one or more programs
- Provide interface between management and customer
- Allocate resources between projects
- Implement and manage database of lessons learned
- Implement and manage risk database
- Provide networking and environmental scanning
- Consulting and Mentoring
- Coordinate between projects
- Methods and Standards
- Develop and implement a standard methodology
- Monitor and control project performance
- Implement and operate a project information system
- Develop and maintain a project scoreboard
- Conduct project audits
- Conduct post-project reviews
- Monitor and control performance of PMO
- Software Tools
- Provide a set of tools without an effort to standardize
- Training
- Develop competency of personnel, including training
- Project Managers
- Provide mentoring for project managers
- Promote project management within organization
- Execute specialized tasks for project managers
- Recruit, select, evaluate, and determine salaries for project managers
- Manage benefits
These six groups define what I believe should be the services offered by the fully functional PSO of the future. The full-service PSO offers services aligned with the six major functions just listed. These are the services that the current and future PSOs should be supporting. They are briefly described in the following sections. Not every PSO will provide all six functions. Deciding on the services to be offered by a PSO is the responsibility of senior management. I would advise that all six functions be included in your PSO organization because they are critical to fully supporting the complex project environment.
The fully functional PSO of the future serves these six major service areas. Here is a brief description of the six purposes of the PSO of the future. Unless otherwise stated these services extend across all project types in all four quadrants. As the PSO provides that support, there may be differences by project type.
Project support — This includes preparing proposals, gathering and reporting weekly status information, maintaining the project notebook, and assisting with the post-implementation audit.
Consulting and mentoring — Professional project consultants and trainers are available in the PSO to support the consulting and mentoring needs of the project teams. In this capacity, they are a safe harbor for both the project manager and team members.
Methods and standards — This includes such areas as project initiation, project planning, project selection, project prioritization, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) templates, risk assessment, project documentation, reporting, software selection and training, post-implementation audits, and dissemination of best practices.
Software tools — The evaluation, selection, installation, support, and maintenance of all the software that supports project work is part of this function.
Training — Training curriculum development and training delivery may be assigned to the PSO, depending on whether the organization has a centralized training department and whether it has the expertise needed to develop and deliver the needed programs.
Project manager resources — Here the PSO provides a resource to project managers for advice, suggestions, and career guidance. Regardless of the organizational structure in which the PSO exists, the project manager does not have any other safe place to seek advice and counsel. The PSO is ideally suited to that role. A variety of human-resource functions are provided. Some PSOs have project managers assigned to them. In these situations, the project managers are usually assigned to complex, large, or mission-critical projects.
Specific Portfolio of Projects
I have already identified one type of portfolio — one that contains projects that have a link through their goals and purposes. In other words, collectively these projects represent a major initiative to accomplish some overall common purpose. The PDQ case study is a good example of a small project portfolio of six development subprojects that are all linked by a common purpose. A good example of a large portfolio was the U.S. space program. Think of a single project as something that will accomplish a part of a greater overall mission. Thousands of such projects made up the space program. Together all of the projects represented a single focus and common purpose. As stated previously, these projects form a program and are administered under a Program Office. When the goal of the projects that are part of the program is accomplished, the Program Office is disbanded.
Another portfolio of projects that you can identify is one that organizes projects under a single organizational unit and is funded from the same budget, such as IT. The IT department's PSO will be a permanent structure that supports all IT projects now and into the future.
Yet another specific portfolio that deserves mention is made up of projects that are funded out of the same budget. They may have no other relationship with one another other than the fact that they share a finite pool of money or human resources. These projects are often linked through a PSO. Such a PSO will be primarily interested in ensuring the proper expenditure of the dollars in the budget that funds all of these projects. These PSOs generally have a project portfolio management process in place to manage the budgets for their projects. Chapter 14 takes up this topic.