Hi Marian

It is not a good idea to liven up an old thread.

Better start a new thread in the correct forum.

Best regards

Mike Testro (Moderator)

Sonia,

A tool that may help you with putting together a PMO to stanardize processes/practices and obtain better cost contorl is PRISM Project Manager.

You can check it out at: www.arescorporation.com

Sonia

There are companies did implemented PMO to manage their projects, program in a portfolio level as well as establish procedure and standard for scheduling and control function.

Can I have some ideas in this regard?
As for any structure, in order to function properly you need, people, tools and processes. PMI did have some material in terms of role and functionality of PMO and I been told that they are going to revise the PMBOK to reflect the changes Portfolio Management. A project manager manage a project is very different to a PMO manage a group of projects. PMO manage a range of outcomes, where a project manager only has one single objective. For example, in order to finish a particular project earlier due to contractual issue, they may stop other project in order to transfer the resource to finish the job, however, the project manager may have a very different view because the project he managed may be in risk. As a result, PMO have to have a very different view, tools, and technics to manage a portfolio of works.


(We don’t have a centralised project planning/monitoring system, but is done at site level, though the management takes reports from all projects for top level analysis)

In order to have the PMO run effectively, transparency between projects is very important, the ability to grouping projects, analysis resource, cash flow, manage critical path, what-if and scenario analysis and procurement management. To run the PMO smoothly you need a single standard, and platform that can quickly give you all these information. If you have a company running in a seperate and disconnected project management system, it is very difficult to run the portfolio effectively. Take an example, if a particular material use commonly across the projects uses different names, how can you manage and see when and where you need these materials, and what if a supplier factory burned to ground and unable to provide that material for next 6 months. How can you make the decision who should get the remaining materials - if every PM said that they are important than the other, how can the PMO making a effective decision without these information on hand to resolve this type of issue quickly.

You will always come across that every project are different and they need a different system to manage - is that true?? We all study project management to manage projects ... are we doing everything differently??

The benefits of PMO or portfolio management are enormous, however, you need to have the top management buys in before you can break the barrier of individual. (All to do with change management)

Good luck

Regards

Alex