project-office

Participants in the UCSC Extension advanced course on the “Project Management Office” had ample opportunity to explore their environmental challenges, share questions with others, and prepare action plans on implementing a project office for organizational change.  They came with real questions and left with renewed understandings about the potential for anything from a Project Office [...]

As a judge for the PMO of the Year sponsored by the Center for Business Practices, I was impressed by all the entries.  One in particular, however, stood out.  PMO Director at Accident Fund Insurance, Norm Buckwalter says, “Through our responsibility of leading the creation and execution of the strategic plan [...]

Much as he did earlier in his career, Proman was now at another crossroad. The large program had just concluded. What’s next? He noticed how engaged he’d felt during the process. Each day he threw himself into the proceedings with renewed vigor and seemed to know instinctively what to do. [...]

The escalation process worked! As work on the program drifted past the scheduled completion date, Proman sensed the pressure coming from across the organization. Managers wanted their engineers back to work on product development, not on solving broad reaching technical issues. But the impasse was real. Development could not continue (or [...]

Leading the change process to support a project-based organization (PBO) requires a focus on adding value and alignment, from strategy through to execution.  Management roles and approaches to leadership in a PBO might range from a Project Office of One (POO) to a Strategic Project Office (SPO).  If this is your concern, first

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Hello PM Bloggers.  I have been away from the site for a few months and I have been playing catch up on all the inputs since then. WOW, there is a lot of wisdom out there.  Reading these blogs is almost equivalent to actually experiencing the trials and tribulations of real world projects.  I think [...]

Many executives are assigned as project sponsors, but their organizations do not spend time training and explaining their expected roles and responsibilities during project life cycles.   The accidental project manager role is well known, and the same applies to sponsors.
The sponsor role can have a tremendous impact on project success.  However, reality is quite different. [...]

Part One of Creating the Project Office is creating the conditions for change; Part Two is making the change; Part Three is making change stick.  Our greatest challenge in putting the concepts into action is to rewrite the myth of Sisyphus.  Greek gods condemned Sisyphus to keep rolling a rock to the top of a [...]

Part One is creating the conditions for change; Part Two is making the change. We are now ready to enter the final phase of the journey, the toughest part: making change stick.  If the change agent team has made it this far, some amount of time has elapsed.  The project office has no doubt changed [...]

Part One creates conditions so that change could happen.  In Part Two, change the emphasis from planning to doing.  Now is the time to make contact with those people in the organization who must actually carry out the planned changes.  A military dictum asserts “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”  The members [...]

Creating a project office may be the “in thing” to do.  It is also fraught with perils.  A goal may be to implement a project office as a vehicle for organizational change.  The first step, then, is to discover the processes necessary to lead organizational change and create the conditions that will enable change.  This [...]