MGMT 690 Week 3 DB Forum 2 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: Thread

MGMT 690 Capstone, Project Management, Discussion Board Forum 2: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the engineering firm are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Jarocki's book, the peer-reviewed studies and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 690.

Our firm employs about 240 engineers and technicians who design roads, bridges and water systems for state and local governments. Two years ago, after two highway interchange projects ran 18 and 23 percent over their design budgets, the executive team created a project management office. It was staffed by two analysts and charged with collecting a monthly status report from each of our 60 project managers. Within three months, reports were arriving late, filled with copied text, and project managers were calling the office "the report police." The executives were frustrated too, because the reports did not help them see trouble any earlier. A third project, a bridge rehabilitation, overran its budget during the PMO's first quarter, and the warning sign had been sitting in a report no one read closely.

The research suggests our experience is common. Hobbs and Aubry (2007), in the first phase of a multi-phase research program on PMOs, found no consensus on how PMOs are or should be structured, which functions they should perform or what value they add, despite how widespread they had become. Our executives had assumed that a PMO was a known solution; the research says it is a family of very different arrangements. Aubry et al. (2007) proposed understanding the PMO as part of an organization's changing system of project management, shaped by its history and politics, rather than as a fixed structure, which explains why a reporting office imposed after two failures was seen as a punishment.

Dai and Wells (2004), exploring PMO features, examined how functions such as standards and methods, project history archives, training and consulting support relate to project performance. Their work points to the functions our PMO lacked. Our project managers needed help with the problem that caused the overruns, estimating design effort for complex interchanges, and they would have welcomed a PMO that kept a database of past projects' actual hours and offered an estimator to review new budgets. Bringing in a PMO is a change in its own right, which is the kind of situation Jarocki (2011) has in mind when he joins project and change work: project managers should have been asked what help they wanted before the office was designed.

Last spring the firm did ask. A survey of the 60 project managers found that their top request was a library of actual hours from past projects by type, followed by a second review of large fee proposals and a shared set of scheduling templates. The PMO now provides all three, and its monthly report shrank to a one-page dashboard generated from the timekeeping system, so project managers no longer write it by hand. In the first two quarters under the new arrangement, the share of projects finishing within their design budgets rose from 71 to 84 percent, and two project managers who had called the office the report police volunteered to help build the estimating library.

When David prepared Solomon to build the temple, he gave him the plans, organized the priests, Levites and craftsmen for the work, and told him to be strong and do it, because God would be with him until the work was finished (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Chronicles 28:11-21). David's preparation was support for the builder, not surveillance of him, and that is the difference between a PMO people use and one they avoid.

Group: in the PMOs you have worked with, which function did project managers actually value?

References

Aubry, M., Hobbs, B., & Thuillier, D. (2007). A new framework for understanding organisational project management through the PMO. International Journal of Project Management, 25(4), 328-336. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2007.01.004

Dai, C. X., & Wells, W. G. (2004). An exploration of project management office features and their relationship to project performance. International Journal of Project Management, 22(7), 523-532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2004.04.001

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Hobbs, B., & Aubry, M. (2007). A multi-phase research program investigating project management offices (PMOs): The results of phase 1. Project Management Journal, 38(1), 74-86. https://doi.org/10.1177/875697280703800108

Jarocki, T. L. (2011). The next evolution: Enhancing and unifying project and change management. Brown & Williams Publishing.