Dow - The tactical guide for building a PMO

Copyright @ 2012 William Dow, PMP

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission from the author.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9858695-0-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9858695-1-9

When I thought about dedicating this book, I wanted to focus on my family, both immediate and extended. You know who you are, so I will not go into a long list of names, but you all have to know how important you are to me. Everyone talks about the importance of family and I am no different, so this book is dedicated to my family, and I thank you all.

William (Bill) Dow, PMP, is a published author and a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with more than 23 years of experience in information technology, specializing in software development and project management. Bill has a passion for project management, project management organizations (PMOs), and software development methodologies. Bill has a strong, successful background in project management specifically in understanding and developing project management methodologies. Bill started his career in the late 1980s as a Computer Programmer Analyst, he has also worked as a consultant all across North America, and has led large PMOs at AT&T Wireless/Cingular and at Microsoft Corporation.

Bill has taught project management and IT courses at both US and Canadian colleges. His favorite class centers on his first book, Project Management Communications Bible.

I want to thank my wife, Kath, and son, Bill, for their support while I wrote this second book. As you can imagine, book writing is a huge undertaking and requires support from them both. I hope they are both proud of me as much as I am proud of them.

I also want to thank my mother and my brothers and sister. Each of you are very important to me, great support mechanisms and I love you all.

Book Front, Back and Side Cover(s) DesignElysia Chu

Book ForewordMark Perry Price

Book EditorSarah Rogers

PMO Leadership, Mentor, FriendAl Callan, PMP

Portfolio Management Thought LeadershipYorai Linenberg

Program Management & Thought LeadershipMark Bestauros

Project Management Thought Leadership & ConceptsJerry Baker, PMP

PMO Change Agents -Diana Lilla, M.A., PMP

PMO History, Mentor, Friend - Bruce Taylor

Table of Contents

Starting in the early 1980s as a sales and marketing professional, I learned much about PMOs and how PMOs of all shapes and sizes can be of tremendous benefit to an organization. From my experience being in PMOs, managing a few PMOs and having PMOs report up to me or serve me along with other constituents, I have seen firsthand how PMOs can play a key role in meeting an unmet business need, fulfilling a mandate, achieving a set of defined objectives, and delighting stakeholders as measured by a very real and quantifiable business value.

Imagine my surprise when in the late 1990s, after two decades of very successful PMO-related experiences, all on the goal-oriented and objective rich line-of-business side, I entered the formal project management and PMO community. What I soon discovered within this formal project management community, adorned by its industry associations, standards and certifications, was far more than disappointing; it was nothing short of shocking and, I might add, disturbing.

In short, I found a myopic and self-serving project management community with a view of what a PMO should be that was characterized by cookie-cutter PMO models; simplistic and theoretical resources, procedures, and infrastructure strategies; misguided advice for selling the PMO and obtaining executive buy-in; exploitative promotion of knowledge-based certifications; and a view of a PMO that was more aligned to the profession and establishing a Center of Excellence of some kind that reflected that profession. Rather, a PMO should be characterized as a properly cast organization within a business, founded with a leadership team-determined mandate, supported further by a leadership team vision, mission, goals and measurable objectives for the PMO, their PMO.

Harsh words. But, as someone who over the last decade has worked with hundreds of PMOs in over forty-five countries, across six continents, I stand behind these words resolutely. And, I might add, various industry studies and research indicate that 25% of PMOs fail within year one, 50% of PMOs fail within year two, and 75% of PMOs fail within year three, which only confirms that within the formal project management community there is a significant problem with its view of what a PMO is.

The remediation of the industrys incorrect view of the PMO, and poor PMO track record, is not to throw out all that has been advanced within the formal project management community. As the saying goes, With all of this expletive-deletive , theres gotta be a pony in here somewhere. Many people advocate that a PMO balance needs to be struck between the means to the end and the end to be achieved. Or, put another way, until an organization casts the purpose of its PMO in terms of what business problem the PMO is solving and how the PMO will be held to account, there can be no sensible discussion about such things as PMO models; resources, procedures, and infrastructure strategies; how to sell the PMO; and on and on.

Perhaps there is no stronger advocate of this premise than Mark Langley, the CEO of the Project Management Institute, who advised attendees of the Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit that if we continue to speak of project management in terms of such things as scope, time, and cost, then project management will fail us all. Langley went on to suggest that we need to speak of project management in terms of a new and more contemporary project management triangle, one that has at its three points: (1) technical project management per our standards and bodies of knowledge, (2) business acumen, and (3) leadership. And for this, there is no certification.

What Mark Langley and other project management and PMO experts know all too well, including the author of the book that you hold in your hand, is that when PMOs are driven by the needs of the business, they succeed; and when PMOs are driven by other motivations and biases, they are short-lived. Building an organizational entity of any kind within a company or enterprise is no small feat. The more collaborative and cross-silod that an organization needs to be, the more complex the endeavor will become, and arguably there is no more collaborative and cross silod of an organization than that of a PMO.

In response to this challenge, Bill Dow, in this book, provides a masterful guide for how to build a PMO: a tactical guide that is tempered with over two decades of his PMO and project management-related experience. Use this book to start a new PMO, refresh an existing PMO, or advance multiple PMOs of different types and sizes throughout the enterprise, but most importantly, use this book to address and solve business problems for which a PMO of some kind and project management techniques of some kind can be a viable, if not best, option. Kudos to Bill Dow for what will no doubt be a lasting PMO reference.