Companies are created, structured and run primarily to deliver operational products and services. Projects, however, are still critical to these organizations success – in creating, enhancing, replacing and retiring products and services in response to competitive and market demands. This article explores how these functions can effectively co-exist.
The Project Manager As Organizational Leader
Does being a project manager also involve organizational leadership? While this is an easy question to ask, it is a difficult one to answer. When we can stay in the box defined by our scope, life is relatively easy. Yet much of our job is about managing the boundaries themselves. That is where the need for leadership emerges.
Defining The PMO Role: The Quest For Identity
Defining the PMO role is critical in establishing its purpose. This starts with defining the stakeholders who the PMO is to serve, and being clear about their expectations. Only then can a PMO truly define how to deliver its services.
Maturity Models: A Framework for Organizational Improvement
There has been a lot written about the idea of project management maturity, yet there persist a number of challenges, half-truths and misunderstandings about how they work and what they are used for. This article attempts to shed some light on an important construct.
The Conflict Between Doing & Managing: A Project Manager’s Eternal Dilemma
Project managers must perpetually balance between doing, managing and leading. Part of this challenge is that the ‘real work’ of doing projects is often seen as producing deliverables, and not managing the project. The result is that project managers often take on more than they have capacity to be able to accomplish.
Defining The PMO Continuum: Walking The Razor’s Edge
There is an enormous diversity of opinions about what a PMO should actually do. For every PMO, they must find one essential point of balance — the degree to which their purpose is one of support or of control.