Week 7
Supporting Enterprise Projects, Programs, and Portfolio with a Project Management Office (PMO)
In large organizations, strategies, standards, and governance should guide projects to ensure consistency across programs and projects. As projects, programs, and portfolio management continue to become more common, it is important for an organization to have a centralized point or unit to handle these complex endeavors. This is where a separate business unit or department needs to be instituted. That unit is commonly known as the Project Management Office (PMO).
The purpose of the Project Management Office (PMO) is to serve as a one-stop-shop for project management standards, forms, and procedures. The Project Portfolio Management Office (PPMO) serves at the executive level to oversee and leverage the portfolio of project investments, budget management, and forecasting. It is important to carefully understand the organization, its’ hierarchy, and its’ plans to ensure that the development or extension of PMOs or PPMOs have an opportunity to succeed. Also, formal and informal comments regularly remind one that it is unlikely that these options will succeed unless there is a reasonable level of maturity regarding project management within the organization.
The addition of a PMO or PPMO requires appropriate staffing, clear communication media channels and standards, and advanced tools to leverage success. These new structures also imply a change in business processes, communication, and new levels of collaboration, corporate culture, and organizational assets.
Weekly Resources and Assignments
Review the resources from the Course Resources link, located in the top navigation bar, to prepare for this week’s assignments. The resources may include textbook reading assignments, journal articles, websites, links to tools or software, videos, handouts, rubrics, etc.
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Week 7 – Signature Assignment: Design a Program Management Office (PMO)
Assignment
Due August 22 at 11:59 PM
For this assignment, you must use the scenario and the framework from the Week 2 assignment to design a Project Management Office (PMO).
Begin by ensuring the organization in your scenario has sufficient complexity and volume of project management to justify a PMO. You may need to adjust your vision to include multiple locations, each with multiple projects that include cross-functional members within the project team. You may also choose to add divisional or departmental management structures that oversee projects related to specific objectives for that group of projects.
Use your scenario to complete the following instructions:
Include a brief introduction about the organization and its strategy, mission, and vision. Limit your content to be no more than one page.
Identify the issues and opportunities leading to the need for a PMO.
Insert a section called PMO Charter, where you will state the following:
Executive overview and background
Purpose of the Charter
Mission, Vission, and Strategy
Role and purpose of the PMO
Scope and areas the PMO will manage
Structure diagram identifying the layout of the program and project management
Code of Ethics
Standards and procedures to be instituted and managed by the PMO
Details about the specific roles and responsibilities in each area, including the relationship with different types of projects.
Provide the organization’s structure of the PMO and hierarchy level within the organization’s structure. (PMO Director, Portfolio, Program, and Project Managers)
Detail the roles and responsibilities within the PMO (also include PPfM, PgM, and separate projects) in the form of a roles and responsibilities matrix.
Describe an appropriate framework, relevant procedures, and appropriate standards. Include important templates; some may need to be included as appendices to avoid extending the assignment beyond its maximum length.
Offer brief details about how you would initiate and execute the PMO.
Outline the templates and standards for project planning and executions, like communication tools, PMIS, etc.
Length: 12 to 14 pages, including supporting tables and images
References: Include a minimum of 7 scholarly resources
The completed assignment should address all of the assignment requirements, exhibit evidence of concept knowledge, and demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the content presented in the course. The writing should integrate scholarly resources, reflect academic expectations and current APA
Week 2
Portfolio Management – Project and Program Selection
Project portfolio management (PPfM) is similar to financial portfolio management, for it focuses on the evaluation of proposed projects, their justification, and budget requests, make selections and recommendations based on strategic goals, or immediate needs, like compliance requirements.
The primary objective of portfolio management is to prioritize and select projects to be funded and authorized to launch. Typically, the scope for PPfM is enterprise-wide. A particularly large organization, such as U.S. federal government or multinational organizations, may have project portfolio management in multiple major divisions. One of the attributes of a portfolio is the need to include separate projects that do not fall within a program. Other attributes that separate a PPfM function from program management (PgM) and project management (PM) functions include their activities, as illustrated below.
Figure 2
Portfolio Management
The initial and most important function of portfolio management is the selection of programs and other projects that can be supported, based on organizational budget projections and strategy. The selection of programs does not necessarily imply the regular elimination of programs within the portfolio. The focus typically involves the allocation of budget, resources, objectives, and the prioritization of programs. It is not unusual that the portfolio management function will go beyond the program as a whole, but also consider the stakeholders within the program, the importance of the projects, and the relevance within the larger organization.
Defining effective program boundaries and separate projects is a critical success factor for PPfM and PgM. Project selection must focus on the organization’s strategy, vision, and mission. Influences such as innovation, collaboration, partnership, globalization, sustainability, and legal requirements will introduce complexity. The selection processes will work with an overall financial constraint, and that might imply that one large project might eliminate multiple smaller projects. This implies that any exceptionally large project has to be separately considered so that trade-offs can be made between the single largest project and a group of smaller projects. An example might be $25 million available while there are 30 important projects totaling $52 million. If one project requires $15 million, then there would be special considerations regarding the acceptance or rejection of the exceptionally large project. The large project would eliminate many regular projects; however, the large project might be very desirable. This illustrates the importance of portfolio management and its role in balancing the overall outcome to optimize organizational value.
A different challenge is the estimation of different project components and reaching an agreement regarding their size. Two common approaches for related issues include function point analysis in software and, in general, t-shirt size techniques to facilitate agreement through simplification (Bright Hub PM, 2020).
Most often, there are multiple objectives leading to complex decision-making requirements. This complexity is often referred to as multi-criteria problems or the need for holistic approaches. This complexity implies the need for advanced tools to aid and improve decisions because regular techniques will not be adequate. A decision tree is a frequent simple tool that helps processes within PPfM and in other project decision processes. Hulett (2014) provides an update of an earlier publication illustrating the use of decision trees.
References
Bright Hub PM. (2020). Use relative sizing to estimate stories in an agile project. T-shirt sizes provide a way to categorize and estimate buckets of stories using sampling.
Hulett, D. T. (2014). Use decision trees to make important project decisions.
Weekly Resources and Assignments
Review the resources from the Course Resources link, located in the top navigation bar, to prepare for this week’s assignments. The resources may include textbook reading assignments, journal articles, websites, links to tools or software, videos, handouts, rubrics, etc.
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Week 2 – Assignment: Illustrate a Decision Tree as Part of a Decision Framework
Assignment
Due May 31 at 11:59 PM
For this assignment, you must develop and describe a decision tree that could be used to select projects for an organization.
Begin by imagining a scenario for an organization with enough complexity to warrant the use of a project management office (PMO), portfolio management (PPfM), program management (PgM), and project management structure. You may use the sample organization (NCUONE-CCS) provided in the Course Resources area.
Use your scenario to complete the following steps:
Write a short paper describing your organization and the reasons why the organizational complexity warrants the use of a PMO, PPfM, PgM, and project management structure.
Create a decision tree that can be used to guide decision-making within portfolio management. Use your preferred diagramming tool or consider using Excel with bold cell borders around the decision elements and insert arrows to link the elements together on the decision tree.
Insert your decision tree into your paper as an image.
Describe the reasons for the various decision tree selection options and how they can be used to contribute to better outcomes.
Length: 3 to 4 page explanatory paper
Assignment Deliverables:
explanatory paper
original decision tree file
The completed assignment should address all of the assignment requirements, exhibit evidence of concept knowledge, and demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the content presented in the course. The writing should integrate scholarly resources, reflect academic expectations and current APA standards
