How can a PMO prevent strategic project failures?

Why Strategic Projects Fail

• Project managers who lack enterprise-wide multi-project planning and control skills and tools often find it impossible to comprehend the “big picture.” Thus projects get worked on individually, but overall company priorities aren’t necessarily supported.
• Projects are not actively and realistically tracked and managed throughout execution. Thus change, kill, or recover decisions are not made early enough.
• Most organizations promote proficient technicians to manage projects instead of developing needed project management skills. Thus many organizations have raised a crop of project managers who are administrative in outlook—reactive managers who merely report trouble after it has occurred, rather than being able to take responsibility for outcomes and act to resolve problems.
• Executive support for/understanding of projects is lacking in many organizations, and there is a high correlation between lack of clear project sponsorship and failure.

What Can Be Done About It: Key PMO Functions

• Knowledge management: Develop a repository of best practices in planning, estimating, risk assessment, scope containment, skills tracking, time and project reporting, which the PMO maintains and supports, providing the organization consistency in project performance.
• Skills development: Make sure your project managers are competent: able to define requirements, estimate resources and schedule their delivery, budget and manage costs, motivate teams, resolve conflicts, negotiate external resources, manage contracts, assess and reduce risks, and adhere to a standard methodology and quality processes. Such project managers are grown in an environment that trains, mentors, and rewards them based on performance in projects—an environment best created under the oversight of a PMO.
• Performance measurement: Project metrics and milestones must be defined, measured, and reported in a consistent manner. Setting up such processes is a core activity of the PMO. For the enterprise-level PMO, measuring the performance of strategic intitiatives against expectations set by corporate strategy is a key differentiator of award-winning PMOs.
• Project and portfolio tracking: Critical dates must be monitored via enterprise time tracking software—usually Web-based for ease of use. This is a necessity for larger projects, multi-project environments, and dispersed project teams. Enterprise-wide software implementation and multi-project oversight cannot be well managed except by a PMO.
• Project portfolio management: the systematic selection, prioritization, and evaluation of projects across the enterprise— cannot be effectively engaged in without a PMO.
• Methodology implementation and improvement: Projects must be carried out in a standard, published way, with a project methodology that sets planning and control standards, review points, the nature and frequency of project management meetings and change control procedures.

Source: Crawford, J.K., et al. (2008). Seven Steps to Strategy Execution: Integrating Portfolios, Programs, Projects and People for Organizational Performance. Glen Mills, PA: Project Management Solutions, Inc.