Volume One Issue One
Page 4 – Why Do You Need a PMO?
2. Collaboration
Collaboration is the coordination and sharing
among individual organizations and stakeholders to achieve a common goal.
Typical benefits of better collaboration include:
• Improved alignment of project team members, as well as separate
project teams
• Heightened team involvement in all project phases
• Improved quality of both schedule and deliverables
• Enhanced integration
The benefits of collaboration are attained through the following:
• Knowledge Sharing. Sharing knowledge across and within projects saves time, facilitates re-use of information, and reduces time searching for information. This can result in substantial savings, because the typical employee spends approximately 15-30 minutes per day searching for information.vi The PMO provides a common repository and other knowledge sharing tools (e.g., project library, best practices, calendar, templates, etc.).
• Coordinating Work. Coordinating work requires managing schedules and tasks across multiple teams and vendors, toward a common goal. Collaboration and coordination enable shared understanding of the “work that is to be done” by project teams and individuals. The PMO provides tools (e.g., portal, scheduling engines, etc.) and processes to facilitate the coordination of work.
• Sharing Resources. Resource contention and scarcity of key resources is a constant problem on projects. The ability to schedule key resources across multiple projects can be one of the primary keys to success. The PMO provides a global view (e.g., resource pool) from which projects can draw to make resource assignments.
3. Communication
Communication on projects is multi-directional and should provide all stakeholders and management with timely, accurate information. Typical benefits of better communication are pervasive throughout the project, but primarily include:
• Improved ease of communication both horizontally (across projects) and vertically (with executive sponsors and other key members of the stakeholder community)
• Improved reporting accuracy and timeliness of information
• Improved oversight of project activities organization-wide
• Improved consolidation of activities and data into information
• Better issues management and action item tracking
These benefits are attained through the following:
• Reporting.
Project status reporting is historically problematic. Project teams traditionally
do not have the tools to properly communicate the true status of a project.
Two aspects of reporting that a PMO can improve are timeliness and accuracy.
This is achieved through centralized tools (e.g., project schedule server,
issues tool, risk tool,
etc.), reports (e.g., schedule report, Earned Value report, etc.), and
templates (e.g., executive status dashboard, etc.). PMO communications
processes also provide better targeting of information to project stakeholders.
Executive reports versus detailed status can come from the same information.
• Information Sharing. Information sharing is a common problem for most projects because information tends to flow up, but not down or across. The individual team member often is not informed on other parts of the project or program. A PMO can facilitate the sharing of information, status, and news to individuals across projects, such as project status, best practices, new templates and techniques, legal issues, policy changes, and organizational news. The PMO can also provide tools to allow sharing of limited information with different groups such as clients, team members, managers and executives.
• Tracking Business Benefits. Many projects reach implementation only to discover that the business benefits have not been achieved. While there are many factors contributing to this dilemma, failure to track business benefits during the project—from requirements through implementation — is a key contributor. A PMO provides a centralized tracking mechanism, which can be utilized throughout a project’s life cycle to evidence the realization of benefits starting with requirements, through implementation.
The typical employee
spends
15-30 minutes per day searching
for information.
Communication
on projects should
be multi-directional and provide all
stakeholders and management with
timely, accurate information.