Setting up a project management office (PMO) in your organization
Benefit 1 - provide a turnkey and ready to use project environment for your project teams when they kick off a new project.
Imagine for a moment you are tasked to set up and equip a real project room for a project team about to start on a new project.
How would you equip this room?
Firstly, the room should only be accessible to team members and certain stakeholders, so it ought to be lockable, with all team members of the project in possession of a key or key card.
You would obviously provide working desks and chairs for team members do work at, collectively and individually. I am sure that you would include a filing cabinet or some form of storage facility, where project documents can be stored safely and where those who have permission to do so, can access them at any time.
You would probably also make sure, that there is a sufficiently large wall area to display the project schedule with all its tasks and milestones. I assume you would also make a calendar with an event and meetings roster available for the team
You would add a whiteboard or two, some pin boards for the team write down their thoughts and visualise their ideas. Depending on the available budget, you would add a videoconferencing system and a large display or overhead projector.
Lastly you would provide some form of noticeboard on the outside of the room where the team could post news items about their project for their stakeholders and interested parties.
Digital Project Environment
Today most project rooms are virtual, but even virtual environments take time to set up. Still, I do not remember seeing a project plan that details setting up a project infrastructure as a task although that is invariably something project managers must do when starting out on a new project.
Depending on the inclination of the person, a project manager will spend either more or less time setting up his or her project infrastructure in whatever IT environment the company provides. Many project managers, particularly those who have executed a number of projects in the past, will have developed their own „best practices“ in setting up their project environments, to the extent where they may be quite averse to the thought that the project environment is set up for them by the project management office, since it will invariably be different to that which they are accustomed to.
From an organisation point of view however, it just does not make sense to have each project manager set up his of her own project environment. It literally is a waste of valuable project time and it prevents any form of standardisation of processes.
Setting up and handing over a fully equipped and operational project environment goes far beyond offering a selection of collaboration tools and work management apps courtesy of the IT department.
Based on the analogy of a physical project room, what features should a digital project environment incorporate?
I propose that it should contain at least this basic set of features:
- entry and access management
- multiple communication channels
- document management facility
- collaboration space
- work management tools
- reporting dashboard
Microsoft Teams
It is not my intention to promote a particular brand of collaboration and project management tools, it is simply that I have spent most of my working career in the Microsoft space, so this is the environment that I know well enough to feel qualified talking about.
I will be referring to the suite of Microsoft products when talking about things like a digital project room. I am fairly sure that these can be implemented in the Google workspace or the Atlassian suite of products. I just do not know enough about these environments.
Fortunately, when initiating a project and developing a project charter, regardless of how complex or how brief, it should provide all the necessary parameters for setting up the project room.
Entry and Access Management
Although project teams are not always fully defined at the outset of a project, core members ought to have been named by the time the project kicks off, so team members may have to be added to the project as it progresses. However, the access rights and permissions can and should be defined in advance for all potential project members in your organization. If you are using Microsoft Teams in your organisation, there is a good chance your organisation is also using Microsoft´s role-based identity management system Entra. The respective roles will determine to what parts or sections of the project room they have access to and what rights permissions they have there.
Controlled access to project rooms
Adding a new team member to a project can then be done quickly by the project manager. Adapting access rights and permissions, invariably requires involvement by IT department and will take significantly more time to process. This is significant too, when organizations plan to incorporate external resources into the project team. Ideally, governance and operational guidelines are in place, so that granting external team members (limited) access to the project does not take weeks but is already in place, based on pre-defined roles for external users.
This issue may extend to considerations concerning the licensing of individual products, for example: Does a specific team member require a project plan 3 licence or would a project plan 1 licence suffice?
Communication systems
Communication is such a multi-facetted topic, so this needs to be broken down a bit: From a technical perspective, it is necessary to differentiate between what is known as online and offline communication, while from an organisational point of view it makes sense to differentiate between formal and structured communications on the one hand and informal and ad hoc communication on the other.
Offline communication channels
By far the most used channel for offline communication is still email, but it is worth considering using chat channels, particularly for the internal communication between project members. The Microsoft Teams chat has developed into a powerful toolset since its introduction a number of years ago.
If you are using email, consider setting up a shared project mailbox to ensure that important information is accessible to all team members.
Online communication
Online Conferencing and video calls have become a standard since the covid pandemic. It has enabled teams to meet, even when team members are physically far apart. A more recent development with far reaching consequences for project teams is the application of AI to meetings. From generating agendas and assisting with visualisation of subject matter to the generation of meeting minutes, the use of AI will significantly reduce meeting related overheads. Hopefully, it will also prove to be a strong enabler for more effective and more outcome-oriented meetings. However, there is a fair bit of groundwork that still need to be done by organisations, before they can harness the power of AI productively in project meetings.
Meeting schedules
A PMO can assist project teams with their meeting management in other ways too. It can, for example, create a meetings schedule for the project by capturing them as events in a project calendar, or more specifically into a group calendar in Outlook.
A group calendar is ideal, as it makes all the planned meetings and events relating to the project visible to the entire project team, without cluttering the personal calendars of those team members that may not be required to attend certain meetings.
Also, defining and creating the complete meetings schedule for a given project at kick-off contributes significantly towards reducing delays caused by scheduling conflicts.
Reporting
Reporting is a formalised way of communicating information concerning the status, progress or state of the project to different stakeholders of the project..
Many project teams are burdened by antiquated methods of presenting reports, mostly in the form of slide shows and PDF´s, with the preparation of reports tying up a significant amount of time every time project stakeholders require them.
Here too, a PMO can make a significant contribution towards reducing reporting related overhead, by providing a reporting dashboard with pre-defined reports or analyses relating to project status or health in terms of progress, cost development, resource utilisation and more.
Document Management
Invariably, the planning and execution of projects, produces a whole host of documents, ranging from internal documents such as project briefings, meeting minutes, project reports to legal and commercial documents such as contracts, service agreements, bill of materials, purchase orders, delivery notes and invoices.
Although the content of these documents may vary from project to project, the type and basic structure of such documents generally is known before the project starts. So why not provide your project teams with a relevant set of document templates at kick-off.
In doing so, you can also determine where these documents should be stored and according to what naming convention they should be named.
That would just be base level, you could take this further, for example by providing data merging capabilities in your documents, so that relevant data can be inserted directly from your project dataset or your ERP systems.
Again, the advent of AI, in the case Microsoft in the form of CoPilot, opens up the exciting possibility of providing your project managers with a virtual assistant that can help draft reports, create presentations, define agendas for meetings and document the topics that were discussed and summarise the outcomes of meetings.
Work management tools
Work management tools describe the toolset required to execute project planning and project monitoring.
Apart from providing a project planning tool, a PMO can and should provide pre-filled project plan templates, detailing the project breakdown structure, task dependencies and role based resources for all tasks, so that the project team can focus on effort and cost estimation and risk analysis. .
Conclusion
Defining operational procedures and guidelines and enforcing them within a project organisation without at the same time providing the project teams with a functional project infrastructure tends to make life more difficult for project managers and their teams. If you really want to improve the performance of your project teams and the quality of your project outcomes, make sure that your PMO is as much a service provider as it is a regulator.