Best Practices: Establishing a Program Management Office
Centralizing Control: 6 Best Practices for Establishing a PMO
Managing by project and adding rigor to overall IT governance can make your organization transparent and go far in aligning technology objectives with business strategy—making establishment of a program management office, or PMO, a long-term cost-saving measure as well as a way to increase excellence. The road to these lofty goals, however, is paved with gotchas that can cause false starts and waste time and money. Fortunately, many errors are preventable, as we’ll discuss. One truth that must be dealt with upfront, however, is that in some organizations we’ve worked with that have established PMOs, the role of IT has changed dramatically. Whether that change is healthy or disruptive depends largely on how well the new PMO functions and meshes with the enterprise.
The responsibilities of PMOs are diverse but commonly include setting standards and methodologies for project management as well as oversight to ensure smooth and on-budget project execution. There is, however, no one-size-fits-all PMO. When setting up a program office, a designated executive or group must define roles and responsibilities, and the structure of the PMO must be customized to the needs of the organization.
Here are our top six best practices to help you achieve this vision.
Table of Contents
3 Author’s Bio
4 Time to Build
4 Figure 1: Why Establish a PMO?
5 Figure 2: Basic PMO Org Chart
9 Figure 3: SLA Elements
11 Making the PMO a Reality: Customer Portal Example
12 Figure 4: Basic PMO Implementation Plan
13 Introducing a Program Management Office
About the Author
Michael Biddick is CEO of Fusion PPT and an InformationWeek Analytics contributor. He has worked with hundreds of government and telecommunications service providers in the development of operational management solutions. Most recently he has supported the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Defense in the deployment of ITIL-based processes that are utilized to make their organizations more transparent and cost effective. Certified in several ITIL life cycle service areas, Michael is also able to leverage over a decade of operational tool design and implementation experience with service desks, network management systems and consolidated management portals in making enterprise architecture decisions.
Prior to joining Fusion PPT, Michael spent 10 years with a boutique consulting firm and Booz Allen Hamilton, developing enterprise management solutions for a wide variety of both government and commercial clients. He previously served on the academic staff of the University of Wisconsin Law School as the director of information technology.
Michael earned a Master of Science from Johns Hopkins University and a dual bachelor's degree in political science and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a contributing technology editor to InformationWeek and Network Computing, he has authored more than 50 articles, including reports on cloud computing, government IT strategies, SaaS and IT process improvement.
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