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 THE PMO
The Project
Management Office (PMO) in a business or professional enterprise is the
department or group that defines and maintains the standards of
process, generally related to project management, within the
organization. The PMO plays a critical role in Project Portfolio
Managment and facilitating overall IT Governance.
The PMO strives to standardize and introduce economies of
repetition in the execution of projects. The PMO is the source of
documentation, guidance and metrics on the practice of project
management and execution.
A good PMO will base project management principles on accepted,
industry standard methodologies such as PMBOK or PRINCE2.
Organizations around the globe are defining, borrowing and collecting
best practices in process and project management and are increasingly
assigning the PMO to exert overall influence and evolution of thought
to continual organizational improvement.
 PMBOK
The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide – Third Edition
is an internationally recognized standard (IEEE Std 1490-2003) that
provides the fundamentals of project management as they apply to a wide
range of projects, including construction, software, engineering,
automotive, etc.
The Guide recognizes 44 processes that fall into five basic process
groups and nine knowledge areas that are typical of almost all projects.
The five process groups are:
1. Initiating,
2. Planning,
3. Executing,
4. Controlling and Monitoring, and
5. Closing.
The nine knowledge areas are:
1. Project Integration Management
2. Project Scope Management
3. Project Time Management
4. Project Cost Management
5. Project Quality Management
6. Project Human Resource Management
7. Project Communications Management
8. Project Risk Management
9. Project Procurement Management
It should be noted however, that for IT Projects many in the industry
do not consider PMBOK appropriate, since the underlying principles are
based upon industrial defined processes. For IT projects, one should
use industrial empirical processes. Methods like SCRUM
take this approach.
PRINCE2
PRINCE2 is a
structured approach to project management. It provides a method for
managing projects within a clearly defined framework.. Prince2
describes procedures to coordinate people and activities in a project,
how to design and supervise the project, and what to do if the project
has to be adjusted if it doesn’t develop as planned. In the method each
process is specified with its key inputs and outputs and with specific
goals and activities to be carried out, which gives an automatic
control of any deviations from the plan. Because of the various roles
and responsibilities involved, participants in the project can easily
blame each other when something goes wrong but only if the Prince2
dictate that roles and responsibilities must be agreed in writing by
the participants when in the SU process is not undertaken.
Contact us today
to find out how we can help your IT organization take control of the IT
Project Portfolio and individual projection execution.
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AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
SCRUM
Scrum is a project management method for agile
software development. Scrum enables the creation of
self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members,
and verbal communication across all team members and disciplines that
are involved in the project.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the
customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often
called Requirements Churn), and that fundamentally empirical challenges
cannot be addressed successfully in a traditional predictive or planned
manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach – accepting that
the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on
maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to
emerging requirements.
Product backlog
and sprint backlog
A backlog is a list of prioritized items to be developed for a software
product. The product backlog is maintained by the Product Owner and is
a list of requirements that typically come from the customer. The
sprint backlog is the Team's interpretation of the product backlog and
contains concrete tasks that will be done during the next sprint to
implement some of the top items in the product backlog.
Sprint planning
Prior to every sprint the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the Team
decide what the team will work on during the next sprint. The Product
Owner maintains a prioritized list of backlog items, the product
backlog, that can be reprioritized during sprint planning. The Team
selects items from the top of the product backlog. They select only as
much work as they can commit to finishing. The Team then plans the
architecture and design of how the product backlog could be
implemented. The product backlog items are then broken down into tasks
that become the sprint backlog.
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