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

Facing the Challenges of Implementing a PSO

Too many executives have the impression that a PSO is mostly a clerical function and that establishing one is not too difficult. Nothing could be further from the truth. J. Kent Crawford provides a compelling discussion of some of those challenges in The Strategic Project Office: A Guide to Improving Organizational Performance (Marcel Dekker, 2001). According to Crawford, the challenges to implementing a PSO are as follows:

• Speed and patience
• Leadership from the bottom up
• A systems thinking perspective
• Enterprise-wide systems
• Knowledge management
• Learning and learned project organizations
• Open communications

Speed and Patience

Effectively deploying a PSO can require two to five years for full implementation. That is a long time. According to the Standish Group research, the longer the project is, the higher the probability of project failure. The way out of this apparent dilemma is to plan the PSO deployment in stages. Begin by prioritizing the support functions according to the level of need, and partition their deployment into stages. Each stage must deliver visible and measurable value to the process and practice of project management.

Leadership from the Bottom Up

A popular approach to putting a PSO in place is a bottom-up strategy. At the department or project level, you must demonstrate value by showing the results that a department-level PSO can achieve. Then, by way of example, others in the organization will see that success ...