Problem Statement
The problem in my organisation is that we have a number of Programme Management Office (PMO) resources that are unsure of exactly what their role should entail or they have limited time to be able to cover all the activities for which they think they should be responsible. In many cases, their Programme Managers do not understand the role of a PMO and how that role differs from a Project admin support person. This leads to PMO resources being unnecessarily used as admin support when they are a higher grade and therefore have a higher cost than an admin support person and have the skills to provide a value add PMO service. As PMOs do not have a structured framework in which to work, often their role profiles are not consistent and they do not have a clearly defined detailed service offering, they do not have the organisational support they need to ensure they understand exactly what their value add PMO role should be. Also every Project is run differently thereby adding unnecessary costs. In cases where a PMO can demonstrate value add, they can become the right hand person to the Programme Manager as they tend to be the only other person on a Programme who sees the end to end delivery. The value add role they can provide then helps reduce the amount of time spent by Programme Managers on those activities. The value add PMO can also become the first point of contact for any audit requirements. This is because they understand from an administrative point of view where all of the documentation is stored, where all of the approvals are held and they are likely to be responsible for all the processes that have been embedded within the Programme which audit will need to understand, a role which usually falls to the Programme Manager in the first instance.
Research Importance and Timing
This is an important area to research as currently there seems to be a move, especially in the banking industry, to embrace an Agile methodology and so a number of companies are moving away from Waterfall. However, whilst implementing a new methodology with new governance models etc, companies are still failing to look at how the ground level administrative tasks are completed and how, if a framework were implemented with consistent ways of working applied, not only could a lot of the administration, governance and audit activities be rolled down to the PMOs to carry out, but when people move from one Project or Programme to another, they will have a much shallower learning curve to climb because if you understand the PMO principles set on one programme, you will understand them on the next. All of which will save resource time and costs on the Programmes.
Research has been carried out in this area, but no one has come up with a framework at a more granular level and at the entry level of a Programme. This is because most companies that are switching methodologies buy in consultants to help them make the switch and consultants are paid to implement a solution at higher level. No one thinks about how the administrative activities get carried out and how consistencies could save companies money.
Other Research
In the USA there are a number of frameworks for PMOs but these all assume that a PMO is actually a Project Manager and that they are implementing a Project. In this scenario so much money is wasted by having Project Managers in a PMO role working on multiple admin support tasks as well as their everyday Project Management tasks. However, companies still wonder why their PMs do not have the capacity to perform their jobs well. Having said that, as this is still a high cost resource (Project Manager doing a PMO role), this structure would be out of scope of this research project.
P3O is a methodology from the UK Cabinet Office which sets out the principles for establishing a Portfolio, Programme and Project Office “P3O”, however this is purely aligned with PRINCE2 rather than dovetailing into either an Agile or Waterfall methodology. Therefore this would be too narrow a focus for this research project.
A number of research papers have been carried out looking at the role of the PMO in specific scenarios, but none provide a framework that all administrative based PMOs could use in any organisation. Therefore these will be extremely helpful when looking at their results in conjunction with the results of this research paper.
