Project Management Office Types

The PMO or the project management office itself is quite important and there are a few different types of PMO that you will come across in your career and in the CAPM and PMP exams.

Supportive PMO

A supportive PMO is more of a consultative role. They will supply templates, best practices, and they don’t really have a high degree of control they just give people guidelines in what to do and say.

For example, “Here’s a good way to do it, but what you do is up to you.” They’re just supporting you. They’re not really directing or controlling anything.

Controlling PMO’s give more of a specific project management framework or methodology, such as the use of specific templates, forms and tools. They also ensure you use them, so they’re saying “Here are the things that you have to use, and this is the way you have to do your project.” It’s controlling the project, but through the use of templates forms and tools that the company uses. A controlling PMO asks for conformance to those governance frameworks. They might have project specific methodologies and specific ways of work.

Lastly the most controlling is the Directive PMO, which is what I personally found a little bit confusing. But directive project management offices take complete control of their projects by directly managing those projects. They have specific project managers, assigned by the PMO, and they report back to the PMO. They have a very very high degree of control in this environment.

So you have supportive, controlling (where we control through templates, governance frameworks and adhering to these) and then directive (where we’re actually taking the direction of the project through the project management office

The primary function of a PMO, no matter what type it is, is to support those project managers in a variety of ways. These ways could include managing shared resources across all projects and this is really important. You might have 10 projects but you only have enough resources for six projects, so you need to shift these around and the PMO can keep an eye on all of this. A PMO will usually have a portfolio view of things and help manage the use of those resources across those different projects.

They can help with coaching, mentoring, training and oversight, monitoring the compliance requirements and the standards and policies and procedures, helping people work with the policies and procedures within an organization, and coordinating communications across projects.

It really does come back down to that project, program and portfolio view where they have a great view of all the things that are going on. In the individual projects they can help with the communication, help with the management of it, and basically are there to support those project managers and help get the job done. And these are the Project Management Office Types.

– David McLachlan

Project Management Data, Information and Reports

Within your project there are three types of data that you’ll come across.

The first is the most raw type of data, things such as raw observations during activities performed to carry out the work. For example, how many times did you do “X”? It’s also called work performance data and you’ll come across this in your CAPM and PMP exam. There’s data, there’s information, and then there’s reports. Each of these feed into each other so it’s quite important to take note of.

Work Performance Data

Data is the raw stuff, raw observations such as a count of “this many actions” or “this many dollars”. Project Management Data is often captured in your Project Management Information System, which is the overall process and software you use to capture and hold project information. Examples include:

1. Work physically completed
2. Quality and technical performance measures
3. Start and finish dates of schedule activities
4. Number of change requests submitted, or approved
5. Number of defects
6. Actual costs or money spent
7. Actual durations of activity

Work Performance Information

We analyze the work performance data to turn it into work performance information, analysing against other information it to give a status, such as estimates to complete on the project. This is where we turn it into things like variances, percentages or charts and information that people can use more readily than just the raw numbers. It’s things such as the cost performance index (which you’ll come across) or the schedule performance index which we’ll need to calculate to see how a project is going.

It also includes things such as:
1. Status of deliverables
2. Implementation status for change requests
3. Forecast estimates to complete

Work Performance Reports

This is where we put all of of that information into a nice pretty document, usually that someone can read quite easily and we turn that into our work performance report. Another way to look at this is we’re executing the processes and physically doing them that’s the work performance data. As we’re controlling those processes we need to analyze them and see how they’re going maybe they’re 80% complete for example that’s our work performance information. Then when we’re wanting to report on our overall project and control that within the business and maybe report up to our executives, managers, sponsors or the stakeholders who are involved then we’re wanting to do a work performance report so they can see how it’s tracking as well.

This really feeds into our project change control and our project communications that help us to show how everything is going.

– David McLachlan

Welcome to this series on project management, where we’re going through the project management body of knowledge, the PMBOK guide. This is from the project management institute and it’s basically a huge tome of knowledge that’s around 800 pages and it has everything in regards to leading, managing, monitoring and controlling, initiating projects – basically all the way from start to finish.

We’re going to go through all of the different modules in the PMBOK guide and go through them as a course so that you don’t have to necessarily read it all the way through yourself. There’s a lot to get through so let’s get into it.

First of all project management is not new, it’s been around for hundreds of years, thousands of years. As long as things have needed to change or needed to get done project management has been around. Building the Pyramids of Giza is a project, creating the Olympic Games and managing the games and making that happen, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, if you’re thinking about publishing a book that is a project – it has a start and an end date, and it has the scope of the project. What we’re trying to say is that projects are everywhere, from a small renovation to your house to even going and doing the shopping or the grocery shopping all of these things have a start and end date, scope that needs to be completed and requirements for the customer. And that’s the point, they’re trying to get to the outcomes of these projects with a result and leaders and managers applying project management principles which is where the project management body of knowledge comes into it.

What is a project?

A project is a temporary endeavor, so it has a start and an end date, it’s not business as usual and it’s not ongoing. It’s undertaken to create a unique product or an unique service or a unique result, something different. It’s a change.

They’re undertaken to fulfill objectives and they produce what they call deliverables. These deliverables fulfill those project objectives. The objective can be any result, purpose, strategic position in the company, a new product like an iPhone. Projects happen at all levels and they bring about a change, so anywhere there’s change there’s going to be a project to try and make that happen.

Projects Are Temporary

Projects are temporary, and which means they have a beginning and an end. The end of a project is reached for a few different reasons and they can be good, they can be happy reasons, and they can be bad reasons such as when projects end because you have run out of money for example, funding is exhausted or it’s no longer available, there’s no money. Or maybe for a happy reason you’ve met the project objectives. Or maybe it’s been realized that you cannot meet the project objectives, maybe circumstances have changed, maybe the project itself has changed, maybe the need for that project no longer exists and there are many other reasons.

There are regulatory reasons, legal reasons, human resources reasons, and that’s basically where projects come into it – they are temporary but the idea is that when you deliver something it will be long lasting. It will last past the end of the project once the project is finished.

Projects Enable Change and Value Creation

A project is aimed at change, it’s aimed at moving an organization from from one state (which is the current state) and move to a future state.

Projects also enable business value creation. We’re trying to deliver value to our customers, whether our customer is internal to an organization, whether it’s internal to our team, maybe it’s external to our organization where we’re delivering something to our paying customers. There are many different reasons we could be delivering business value. They could also be tangible reasons such as monetary assets, market share, stockholder equity. They could be intangible reasons, not monetary related where it’s just brand goodwill, brand recognition, strategic alignment to a certain certain category or to improve a reputation or many other things that are not monetary related.

Reasons to Initiate Projects

There are many reasons to initiate projects, to start them, to initially kick them off. It could be regulations, it could be to fix or improve a product, it could be to implement or change strategies within an organization or a company, or even within a team or even within yourself sometimes. A personal project to get fit or to get the PMP for example. You could satisfy stakeholder requests or needs if stakeholders or customers are asking for something then that could be a reason to kick off that project and get it started.

There are examples of things that lead to the need of a project – you could have new technology, as the pace of change is really increasing in the world. Which means that there’s always going to be a need for project managers and project roles in the world as well. We’ve got competitive forces, to deliver lower prices than a competitor, political changes, huge large-scale changes around a country, market demand like a customer request, economic changes, stakeholder demands like your customers or people within an organization. There could be a social need for what you’re doing, just general improvements for what you’re doing (for example with your Lean Six Sigma quality improvements). There are many many many different reasons that could be used for initiating a project.

– David McLachlan