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

Part IV

Establishing and Maturing an Enterprise Project Support Office

Project offices and program offices have been around for a very long time but variations of the modern Project Management Office (PMO) have only been popular since 1960. They have served their purpose with mixed blessings. Their responsibility for return on investment (ROI) is a continuing topic of debate. My position is that the project, program, and portfolio sponsors are responsible and that is the position I have taken in Part II and reinforce that in Part IV.

In Chapter 3 and Part III I defined my position regarding the generalist and the specialist and the fact that to be a complex project manager the professional must be multi-disciplined. The project management (PM), business analysis (BA), business processes (BP), and information technology (IT) disciplines define the position profile of a project manager. Continuing with that model in Part IV the project support office (PSO) must also support those disciplines.

It is my opinion that we are positioned for a disruptive innovation of the PMO. Early stages of that innovation are what I call the PSO and that is what I present in Chapters 10 and 11. Also as part of that innovation I am seeing a growing involvement of the generalist as discussed in Chapter 3. In a companion book The Business Analyst/Project Manager: A New Partnership for Managing Complexity and Uncertainty (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011) I develop that idea further.

Finally, in Chapter ...