While corporate/IT projects have millions or billions of dollars in the allocated budget, city administrations usually run on limited resources in terms of money, manpower, access to technology, and skills. Typical government project planning processes and decisions are usually influenced by stakeholder’s expectations rather than the potential to make a profit, and project success is generally measured by stakeholder satisfaction. While shareholders, board of directors, senior-level executives, employees, and end-users are the stakeholders for a typical corporate organization, city residents, elected officials, community partners, NGOs, regulatory agencies, and other government organizations are usually the key stakeholders for local governments. The primary reasons for such projects and programs are usually local ordinances, state laws, federal regulations, and the business plans of the organizations.
Local Governments provide a wide variety of services and products to their residents by implementing a diverse array of public works, health and safety, information technology, and other legally mandated projects and programs. How is managing local government projects different from managing corporate/IT projects? Project Specific PMO: Provides project-related temporary services as an entity to support a specific project or program Project support services: Provides enabling processes to continuously support the management of project, program, or portfolio workĮnterprise PMO: Highest level PMO, typically responsible to align project and program work to strategyĬenter of Excellence: Supports project work by providing the organization with standards, methodologies, and tools Organizational PMO: Provides project-related services to support a business unit This study outlines the following classification for PMOs (PMI, 2013, p. There are different types of PMO models that have been identified through research and surveys and one of the models comes from a Project Management Institute(PMI)study on PMOs. PMO staff works in partnership with cross-functional departments to form cohesive teams to achieve project objectives. The office is also responsible for selecting, managing, and optimizing the project resources and ensuring projects are aligned with the organization’s key objectives. The PMO manages and governs the portfolio of key IT and business process improvement projects. It aims to utilize the economies of repetition and standardization in the execution of projects. Programs are a collection of projects that are similar, create the same product/service, or meet the objectives of the program when combined.Ī Project management office (PMO) is a body that establishes, maintains, and governs standards for project management across the organization. Projects are unique, have a definitive start and end date, and usually create, retire, modify or improve a product or service. What is project and program management and how is a project management office (PMO) essential to it? One year later, there is still hardly any information out there about enterprise-wide PMOs in local governments, so I’m going to record my journey of establishing an enterprise-wide PMO at the City of Syracuse, and hopefully, reduce that gap.īefore we jump into what we are doing, let us understand some basic concepts of project management and PMOs. What I found out was that most PMOs if they exist, are either managing IT projects exclusively or manage a specific department’s work.
After I was hired, I immediately started researching to see how other cities are setting up PMOs and was met with a severe lack of information on the topic. As more projects are taken up, it becomes equally important to ensure the quality, security, efficiency, and timely completion of those projects, and to achieve that, we needed to implement formal project management practices that were standardized across the board. Syracuse’s effort to join the league of smart cities has led to a significant increase in the number of projects and the amount of data generated from them. When I was interviewing for the role of Data Program Manager with the City of Syracuse’s office of API last year, the center of conversation was the need for a formal project management practice across the organization. Establishing a Project Management Office(PMO) in City Governments