Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Background of the Project Support Office

Early in the life cycle of any process, there are always the early adopters who stumble onto it and are eager to give it a chance. Their enthusiasm may prove to be contagious, and soon others begin using the process, too. At some point, senior management begins to take notice because the various ways of understanding of the process is creating problems. Not everyone understands the process the same way, and there are many levels of expertise with the tool — while some misuse it, others don't take its use seriously.

If this sounds like the history of project management in your organization, you have plenty of company. Senior management instinctively knew they needed to do something about the problem, and the first reaction was to send people away for some project management training. Usually the choice of training was made by the appropriate middle manager. There was no coordination or integration across business units. Every business unit was doing their own thing (Maturity Level 1) with little thought of standardization or enterprise-wide process design and implementation. This by itself didn't result in much improvement.

As a further attempt to solve the problem, senior management introduced some standards and common metrics found in project management. A project management process was crafted and introduced with a lot of fanfare. All were expected to use it. Some did, some didn't (Maturity Level 2). Some still held on to their old ways ...