Program Management Best Practices

“Right-sized” PMO best practices help drive effectiveness, transparency, and

Challenge

Our client needed to implement some PMO best practices in order to help manage a large, multi-year, highly-matrixed, transformational program. A project framework did exist in part of the organization, but it only existed for IT projects and using that framework was optional. Additionally, not all of this programs’ projects were IT projects, so practices tailored to this program’s effort were needed.

Approach

Plaster Group provided project leadership expertise in the implementation and practice of core program management practices, including risk and issue management, schedule management, integrated change control, scope management, and monitoring/measuring program results. In addition, because the organizational maturity around these practices was low, we right-sized the amount of rigor, detail, and process to appropriately fit the situation, and to help ensure success.

Solution

With direction and leadership from the Plaster Group, the program’s team of project PMs was able to come together around a common set of appropriately-sized best practices by which to run their projects. We worked with the client and group of stakeholders to understand the problem areas, then recommended, gained acceptance and implemented appropriate processes, leveraging a mixture of SharePoint, Excel, and Project Server 2010 to do so. We configured and implemented Microsoft Project Server 2010 to be able to manage all of the project schedules centrally, to track cross project dependencies, and to have accurate visibility into an enterprise resource pool, which was key since many resources are working on multiple projects.

Results

Overall stakeholder satisfaction with Program Management went up significantly. Weekly PM team meetings rapidly became more effective, risks and issues started being proactively surfaced, tracked and managed, statusing and reporting became more transparent, clearer, and more automated, and a common set of PM expectations was established.