Project based management is a widely spread practice in the business world because of its effectiveness in generating competitive advantages. However, it cannot be effective without the support of a strategic project management office (PMO) that actively helps define corporate strategy.
Unfortunately, project management is not applicable in the same way in every organization because companies do not all share the same processes, functions or need for oversight (what we call "maturity" in project management).
For this reason, we distinguish between different levels of maturity according to the workings of the project office, from the most basic to the true strategic PMO:
Low maturity of a strategic PMO: Inventory and control
In corporate environments it is essential to make an inventory of all the initiatives that are under way. That is the mission of a PMO of low maturity: to gather and consolidate information about all the projects and other relevant activities to report where resources are being invested.
Medium maturity of a strategic PMO: coordination
The next step for a PMO is to have the ability to forecast problems and, consequently, to tackle them. This function is common when the PMO coordinates the resource allocation. For example, during periods when there is a high volume of work, it is the PMO that should be aware that projects are accumulating and identify bottlenecks.
A PMO of medium maturity aims to improve the efficiency of the organization, recognizing possible conflicts in the planning process and proposing solutions.
High maturity of a strategic PMO: strategy and business
The highest maturity of a PMO is achieved through a fit with the corporate structure that makes it the right hand of the Board of Directors. This fit implies a governance model where strict methodologies are followed while the most important practical decisions are taken, precisely, based on the information that the PMO offers.
In these cases, the project office becomes a key element for the corporate strategy to become a reality.
Strategic questions for a high maturity PMO
A strategic PMO should be considered as an internal service that offers practical information, answering questions like:
What is the status of the project portfolio?
Are resources scarce? Does this shortage affect cashflow?
Are we executing projects that are no longer worthwhile?
Which proposals or ideas will improve the current portfolio?
What kind of new processes can be implemented as a result of the experience acquired from past projects?
However, this approach does not allow a PMO to fully develop its potential. Strategic PMOs have a proactive spirit: they collaborate with the management in strategy development and manage all project-based work.
While PMOs should be empowered, at the same time they should leave the most important decisions to management. For example, if a protocol is put in place requiring the cancelation of projects with a budget greater than a certain amount (for example, € 500,000), it makes sense to warn directors beforehand allowing them to authorize or indeed veto the final decision.
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The 9th area of knowledge of the PMBOK Guide (Project Management Body of Knowledge) is focused on the Management of project acquisitions, or in other words, the relationship of an organization with its suppliers.
Good relations with suppliers are essential to gain competitive advantage, considering that good procurement will allow us to improve margins and provide alternative strategies to position the organization in the market.
The Project Management Director should participate in the procurement process of the plan, which implies an active collaboration with the procurement department for the planning and management of purchases. As we cannot directly manage the activities of suppliers, it is very important to control the terms of the purchases so that the project execution is not delayed.
This area is one of the most sensitive from the ethical point of view, since there may collusion by suppliers or undeclared conflicts of interest between the project director and the service provider.
Phases of Project Procurement Management
1. Specification
The actors involved in this phase are the procurement department and the project manager. This phase consists of developing and approving a list of the products or resources to be acquired for the project execution.
2. Selection
After the specification phase, the procurement department will have to find the best suppliers, according to the specifications agreed with the project manager.
At this point, it is important to establish the key criteria for the selection of suppliers, like delivery terms, quality of service, cost or offered performance.
3. Contracting
Once potential providers are selected, the procurement department will negotiate delivery terms and payment conditions with the collaborating companies. It is very important that the acquired resources or items be delivered in a timely manner to avoid delays that may affect the execution of the plan.
All the agreed conditions must be included in the budget and in the purchase contract.
4. Control and supervision
The supervision of the purchasing process will ensure a smooth development of the project but we must also have in place the necessary measures to guarantee that any purchase made adjusts to the agreed quality.
Regular meeting and fluid communication between the procurement department and the supplier are important to avoid setbacks and confusion, or to make possible changes that are considered appropriate and necessary.
5. Measure the results
The final step of the procurement process refers, precisely, to the use of a system of performance indicators that allow us to evaluate the effectiveness and success of the entire process.
The evaluation should aim to discard those suppliers that have not complied with the agreed conditions, while positively evaluating those that are a guarantee of success. The formalization of the impressions of the purchasing team and other interested parties is an important element of this phase.
The reports will be fundamental for the execution of future projects because it will enable us to learn from errors, obstacles or difficulties that we have encountered in the way.
The project manager will be responsible for establishing a system to measure results while the procurement department will be the responsible for taking the measurement. Special meetings and workshops will be a great help to analyze KPIs, buyers’ performance, adherence to product specifications and communication with suppliers. In the event of a deviation, the procurement team will have to communicate it to the project manager so that he may apply the necessary changes to the acquisition plan.
Project Acquisition Plan
The Project Acquisition Plan guides the entire procurement process. It is a tool that will help organize and manage the activities or tasks related to the process. The purchasing team will prepare the plan and the director will approve it before carrying out any operation with the suppliers.
In the Procurement Plan, we will include documents on the whole process, such as Agreement templates or contracts, estimated deadlines and the inspection of purchases, ways of contracting, financing model, quality standards, and risk management.
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The methodology is well designed, the managers agree on the need to have reliable information on projects to make decisions and the entire corporate structure is ready to embark on portfolio management. But within a few months, it becomes clear that employees who should feed the system with data about their work are not fulfilling their obligations.
This has been a problem for hundreds of large and medium-sized companies, but luckily there are many tactics to deal with the problem of internal resistance.
In this article, we present a summary of our PMO guide on how to encourage the adoption of a PPM tool.
PPM (Project Portfolio Management) software, responds to a basic need in any corporate environment: the coordination, monitoring and control of all projects to obtain the best possible use of the limited resources available.
A PPM tool can be used to support projects of any kind, for Innovation, IT, Operations, but also for strategy, marketing, or sales, as well as cross-organizational and transformation projects.
In all cases, PPM software will offer many benefits to your business:
A single place for collaborative work between departments and teams
Aggregate information for decision making
Reduction of non-strategic projects
Speed up project delivery times
Save time spent on administrative work
Challenges in adopting PPM software
Unfortunately, this process won’t be without challenges. Like other software, it relies on the data fed into the system. If this isn’t done correctly, the effectiveness of the software will be compromised.
This affects almost all corporate software, not just PPM tools: Imagine a CRM without customer data. Or an ERP without invoices.
Despite the difficulties, PPM software is vital to compete against the best because it provides an unbiased and clear view of the status of the whole project portfolio.
That’s why you will need to manage two fundamental elements when embarking on the transition:
A framework to manage the projects portfolio that is well integrated into the design of the organization
An adoption plan that anticipates employee reactions to channel them in a positive direction
The adoption plan must also consider how non-technical components affect the resistance to change. For example: in some cases, resistance is due to objective problems in daily operations. In that scenario, it is important to listen to the objections and address them.
On other occasions, the resistance is political in nature or due to friction within the management team.
Click here to read our e-book and discover all the problems that can derail successful implementation and how to deal with them.
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Project offices deal with common difficulties regardless of sector, company size or its geographical distribution. A survey done to more than 400 companies reveals that there are common patterns.
In June 2017, ITM Platform launched an online questionnaire composed of 17 questions aimed at studying the maturity of PMOs. We wanted to discover what Project Managers consider the most difficult factors in the management of a PMO in three different aspects: the organization itself, the human resources/project teams and cultural factors, such as the presence of sponsors that promote the performance of the project office.
The questionnaire has a double dimension.
First, it is designed to find out what are the main barriers of existing project offices.
Second, it allows other companies to find out if they need to implement a PMO in their organizations to face their current challenges.
Depending on the answers, the questionnaire provides tips and resources related to the implementation of a PMO, project management methodologies and change management processes.
We have prepared a simple infographic with the most notable results.
How do you think you would stand in comparison? You can still do the test:
The PMO questionnaire, in detail
The questions
The questions were the followings:
Organizational factors
1.Are at least 30% of the activities of your organization based on projects?
2.Do you have departments or transversal functions?
3.Has your organization grown and needs new procedures?
4.Do you have problems with meeting deadlines, cost, scope and quality?
5.Is the information shared in your organization uniform?
6.Is it difficult for your team members to internalize the priorities of the organization?
7.Have you noticed that the work progresses in a spontaneous or decentralized way?
Factors related to talent
8.Is there a training deficit among your project managers?
9.Is the experience of your project managers unequal?
10.Have you detected that your most valuable workers are over-designated?
11.Are your project members interchangeable between projects?
12.Do you have reliable metrics to measure the performance of your team?
Cultural factors
13.Is there a clear agreement on the priorities of your organization?
14.Do you have enough internal leadership to implement project management?
15.Do you have sponsors among senior managers?
16.Does your organization have a “continuous learning” culture?
17.Do you intend to rely in a new PPM tool?
Here are the results we had at the beginning of December 2017:
It stands out that only question 13, about the consensus of business priorities, obtains a balanced percentage of yes and no. In all the other questions, one of the options is clearly the most common.
Attributes of project-based organizations
A quick consolidation of the answers shows that there are common challenges for PMOs, like features that must be met to be a project-based organization, and other responses that indicate that the organization is not project-oriented.
8 of the questions are useful to define if a company has the main traits of a project-based organization that has a project management office or that needs one.
An organization needs a PMO (and has the conditions to implement it) when:
More than a third part of the time of the employees is dedicated to projects
The company is structured as a “Matrix Organization” (that is to say: it has equipment, projects and transversal functions)
Team members are assigned to professional categories and are interchangeable
There are project leaders with the ability to make decisions that go beyond the unitary managements of projects.
Management understands the need to centralize the administration of the project portfolio.
There is a culture of continuous learning
The advantages of using a portfolio management tool are known
PMO challenges
On the other hand, the questionnaire identified 8 common challenges that motivate the implementation of project management offices:
The organization needs new procedures
Projects are not always successful: There are delays, extra costs or poor result at the time of delivery
Information is not uniform, or there is no single source of validated project data, such as a PPM software
There are difficulties for project teams and project managers to assimilate the priorities and apply them in their daily work
There are differences among project managers in terms of experience, knowledge and training needs
Projects fail because there is a lack of organization and coordination between PMs.
The most valuable experts are overloaded with work and have become bottlenecks.
There are no reliable metrics and KPIs to measure the performance of projects in their execution.
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When we talk about project management tools, we often think about gantt charts, project plans and project reports. But when the user is a PMO officer, things are quite different. You probably haven’t thought of all these apps to help you manage your project portfolio.
One of the major responsibilities of a Project Management Office is to adopt a technological suite that supports the daunting mission of coordinating the entire project portfolio of an organization. Additionally, many projects have a heavy data print, often in the form of unstructured data, or data without a clear impact on work quality. However, being able to make decisions based on the analysis of those type of untapped data is extremely important for both project leaders and C-level executives. The PMO in that context should assume a facilitating and catalyzing role.
Each PMO officer ought to select with care the technological portfolio that best meets project nature and the governance model. In this article, we recommend several software applications that can be very useful to organize your ideas and have a hold of a complex, corporate project portfolio. Not all of them are project management nor PPM tools, but they all have clear benefits in this world. Consider them for your own toolkit!
Whether it’s for a corporate PMO or an IT PMO; for strategic projects, R&D or client projects, these apps can be an essential part of your daily operations.
The most useful apps and tools for PMO managers
1. PPM
Because a professional tool to manage your entire project portfolio is the first duty of any PMO.
The tool: ITM Platform
If you don’t already know it, ITM Platform is a cloud-based project, program and portfolio management tool(PPM) with a core strength: it doesn’t need heavy configuration work and and enables an incredibly fast roll-out. With a simplified user experience aligned with the methodological best practices of PMBOK and Prince2, ITM Platform supports the setup of new PMOs with predefined dashboards, customizable reports, plus all the features that a project manager needs.
Pros: ITM Platform is the simplest way to communicate the status of critical projects with senior management, letting them know how money is being spent and supporting more informed decision-making.
Cons: As with any other PPM tool, an adoption plan is required to manage the roll-out, ensure that all project teams are involved and that the system data are reliable.
Want us to show the advantages ITM Platform can bring? Request a free online demonstration.
2. Dashboards and Business Intelligence
In the 21st Century, information must be visual. If you want to make data analysis, you will at least need a robust project that can visualize project reports and establish dynamic relationships between variables.
The tool: Power BI
Power BI: SaaS brother of Excel and cousin of Tableau.
Excel’s SaaS brother and Tableu’s cousin, Power BI is Microsoft’s data visualization tool. It uses the language M (same as Excel), and can be connected to any external source through API.
Pros: Once plugged to your data, it provides a really friendly experience to analyze data… with Microsoft’s quality.
Cons: In order to onboard Power BI it’s highly recommendable to get the help of a programmer that plugs into the data sources – small teams and organizations may have issues here.
How to connect it to ITM Platform: Follow this basic tutorial to use ITM Platform as a data source through the open API: although the tutorial talks avout excel, it’s really the same code.
3. Ticketing and development
IT maintenance and software development teams have very specific work management needs. It’s often useful to adopt software that supports change requirement and issue tickets, as well as agile sprints.
The tool: JIRA
JIRA, from Atlassian, is the standard product for the management of development teams.
JIRA, by Atlassian, is the golden standard for managing development teams.
Pros: JIRA makes it really easy to report issues, user stories and epics to development teams, attach supporting documentation, mention involved people and assign tasks to a given sprint.
Cons: Reporting is not its most satisfactory aspect.
How to connect it with ITM Platform: The native connector allows to send tasks and projects from JIRA to ITM Platform. Just add your JIRA url and actívate the connector!
This easy integration allows PMOs to report and control their development portfolio from ITM Platform.
4. Team communication
If your team doesn’t have a nice communication environment, they will find it somewhere else.
The tool: Slack
I’m sure you know Slack by now. Its combination of IRC-type chat with in-built work management apps has transformed it into a really powerful tool to connect and coordinate teams: channels by project, attachments, checklists, code snippets… While no technology is radically innovative, the product is unbeatable.
Pros: Slack’s Marketplace hosts hundreds of SaaS apps that will boost your productivity enormously.
Cons: While the freemium option is quite elastic, the cost per user and month is high, but you will have to pay it if you don’t want to lose stored data.
How to connect it to ITM Platform: ITM Teambot, ITM Platform’s app for Slack, allows any user find out their assigned tasks and projects, report effort and progress, as well as add comments to their ITM Platform projects, directly from their Slack chat.
5. Demand management: compile change requests
All PMOs face change requests that exceed by far the capacity of available resources. But before ideas can be analyzed and approved, they must live in one place.
The tool: ITM Platform templates for Zapier
The ITM Platform templates in Zapier allow you to collect tasks from anywhere in the cloud.
Thanks to Zapier you can send tasks to an ITM Platform project from hundreds of apps, like Gmail, Google sheets, Dropbox, Evernote… If you take into account the possibilities of multiple-step zaps, there are few limits!
Pros: Empower your entire organization to participate in a culture of innovation and give them an authorized channel to send change requests to the PMO
Cons: Honestly speaking, Zapier is very reliable, and for small data flows it can be even used for free. Of course, the safe bet is to stick to processes that can be automated without affecting performance.
How to connect it to ITM Platform: To understand how to set up a zap you can follow our tutorial, use popular zap templates (below), or use this Google Sheets template.
The template to collect tasks in Google Sheet and send them to ITM Platform.
6. Diagrams
Diagramming processes and workflows is one of the most useful ways to promote change, create new procedures and make sure you’re working scientifically towards organizational improvement. A diagrammed PMO is a better managed PMO!
The tool: Lucid Chart
Lucid Chart is a leader in the niche of professional diagrams
Lucid Chart is leader in this software niche. That said, there’s a lot of really trustworthy competitors, and they’re all using similar license plans. Try on your own a couple of them and go with what you like. If the PMO has only a few users, the cost will be neglectable.
Pros: Do you want to explain complex procedures that affect different areas of your company? Forget pen and paper.
Cons: Very few. In the case of LucidChart, it can even be imported and exported to Microsoft Visio.
7. Big Data Analytics
Big Data won’t be a passing fad for PMOs. If they are in a corporation, they may have to coordinate internal big data projects; in smaller settings, data generated by project teams can be monitored with specific solutions.
The tool: Apache Hadoop
Hadoop, from Apache, is the well-known programming framework for distributed data analytics.
Apache Hadoop is the better known software for distributed data analytics.
Pros: The sheer amount of references of documentation that you can fin don Hadoop has no end.
Cons: Compared to all the suggestions above, it’s a programming language, and not a finished product –it may escape the authority and skillset of the PMO team.
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Many people are discovering that working from home is a great advantage, and companies are inclined to agree. Hiring a contractor over an employee, and using that employee to build a virtual team for projects, is advantageous in a number of ways:
Improvements in employee work/life balance
Little to no travel time
Higher ability to hire the best talent worldwide
Overall increased employee efficiency
While it is apparent that pulling in virtual workers for a team project is a great idea, it’s also important to make sure the business avoids the following possible overall pitfalls. If these issues are successfully deterred, then working from home in a team project works well.
When you work from home, losing focus is more of an issue than in an office. No matter how dedicated a worker is to a project, staying on task might become challenging. Avoid this situation by remaining highly professional when it comes to work. Becoming exceptionally organized, and understand your role on the team. This will help you maintain focus and stay on task with the project, because you will avoid being frustrated with lack of understanding.
Cultural Differences and Communication Barriers
Today’s virtual world runs on a global scale. Anyone who has been on a virtual team understands this issue. While the project is in the planning stages, remain professional. Speak on a professional level, and use textbook English in all written communication. It is important to do this to avoid as many misunderstandings as possible. As the project moves forward, make sure communication barriers are broken down by asking for clarification when necessary. Most businesses will appreciate a question over having to redo a portion of a project due to a misunderstanding.
Technology and Data Access
All project team members must have access to the right technology to do the job, such as survey tools or company passwords. Remote projects depend on this access almost exclusively to get projects finished. Often, businesses will set up secure passwords for each team member. This way, if a team member becomes dishonest and acts in an unethical manner, the company will know where the breach happened. Be sure to keep your security information secret, only use it to work on projects, and never act in a way that would cause anyone to question your integrity. Make remote team projects work by acting as you would if you were sitting in an office with a boss breathing over your shoulder.
Lucy Wyndham
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Project based management is a widely spread practice in the business world because of its effectiveness in generating competitive advantages. However, it cannot be effective without the support of a strategic project management office (PMO) that actively helps define corporate strategy.
Project offices deal with common difficulties regardless of sector, company size or its geographical distribution. A survey done to more than 400 companies reveals that there are common patterns.
Many people are discovering that working from home is a great advantage, and companies are inclined to agree. Hiring a contractor over an employee, and using that employee to build a virtual team for projects, is advantageous in a number of ways: