A property management companies sonoma county office is often associated with just the management of projects, but in this article the case will be made to broaden the scope of a Project Management Office to encapsulate the entire services business and will explain the reasons such a structure is necessary.
Historically, the purpose of a Project Management Office (PMO) is to deliver a project on-time and on-budget through the use of project management best practices. A PMO manages all aspects of a project including budget and resources. Organizations that don’t use PMOs will often find variability in how projects are managed and a lack of consistency in the delivery of quality projects. Often PMOs come into existence through organizational frustration with current project success.
When organizations are looking to implement a PMO a common question is: Should we establish the PMO and place various technical resources in that PMO and thus creating a new services organization? Or should technical resources stay within their current functional organization and only have the project managers housed in the PMO? In other words just set up a project department.
Project work, such as in the IT services business, especially projects for outside customers, is much different from standard IT work. First, internal projects often have a definitive delivery schedule but often the deadline is flexible, depending on when resources are available and unlike external projects, there are no contractual obligations for an on-time project completion. Second, internal projects, if using internal resources, will be of a size and scope that internal resources can handle. External projects, on the other hand, can be quite large in size and may require many resources
In order for a PMO to work effectively management at the executive level has to make a decision to shift power and authority from functional management and create a service organization with decision making authority given to project leaders. To place a PMO within the current management structure can and will cause conflicts. The resources need to be available to do work on a project as the PM sees fit and not negotiate with the functional manager every time the resource is needed. By using a functional management, bottlenecks can often occur (e.g. having the same engineer work on multiple projects), versus an engineer that is assigned to a project in a PMO and only that project. The financial penalties and the assigning and managing of resources variable size projects dictate a project structure is enacted.
