Executive's Guide to Project Management: Organizational Processes and Practices for Supporting Complex Projects

Organizational Challenges and Mitigation Strategies

The PSO of the future must be full service. That means it provides direct support to complex projects and project managers in all four disciplines. Current PMOs already do that for the PM discipline. COE and COP do that for the BA discipline. The IT and BP disciplines have no comparable equivalent. The challenge there will be to create client-side support as a bridge between the IT and BP functions. The IT function is in a state of transition. It is steadily becoming more of a utility or commodity and so the support of it is a changing target. Here the client is the project and the project manager. The BP function is imbedded in the business units where the expertise is resident in the business unit that owns the process. Defining the nature of that support is part of the challenge of becoming a full-service PSO. So the challenge of providing full-service is simultaneously one of integrating support and expanding breadth of discipline coverage. From the perspective of infrastructure, that has been adequately discussed in Chapter 12. In this section I want to consider the operational challenges that will be presented. To a large extent, some of these are imbedded in the present organization but many are unique to the PSO of the future. Both are discussed in the following sections.

Generalists versus Specialists

Except for the simplest of projects every project team should have both generalists and specialists among its members. ...