PMO Creation - Week 4

Now that we have our schedule in place, we have been working well towards that plan. Sarah and Mike are cranking out templates for use by the team. I got them administrative rights to modify the PMO SharePoint site. Mike has been inventorying all the projects we currently have and I've been notifying people that they are on the steering committee. Everyone seems to be enthusiatic. Let's see how the steering committee meeting goes when we start asking them to make those tough decisions. We also came up with a list of rules for the PMO to operate under:

The QPharma PMO will abide by the following rules and norms:

  1. The PMO will operate under full transparency, sharing information with all interested parties
  2. Escalation principles will be published and followed
  3. Nobody works on projects past the research phase until the project is authorized by the steering committee
  4. Projects can be authorized outside the steering committee meetings by approval of a majority of members
  5. All projects within commercial operations require a charter. Professional operations can use a Statement of Work or Signed Contract as their charter
  6. Project Managers will hold weekly status meetings with their teams that last 30 minutes or less
  7. Project Managers will use Earned Value calculations to report on budget
  8. Project Managers will provide a weekly status report to the PMO every Wednesday
  9. Schedules require level of effort to be calculated for each activity
  10. The PMO will provide a monthly dashboard showing all project status to the steering committee prior to their monthly meeting
  11. The steering Committee will meet monthly
  12. Change control will be managed by the steering committee. The PMO head will facilitate the steering committee but the signatures of the majority of members are required to approve a project change
  13. PMO will meet weekly every Friday at 10 AM
  14. Bruce will publish PMO status reports
  15. PMO members will obtain their PMP certification by the end of 2014

PMO Creation - Week 2

The creation of the PMO is not my full-time job. I am still working on projects, making sales calls and staying on top of our operations. But I did accomplish a few things this week. I met with the two IT Project Managers who now report to me and are part of this organization. They are two very enthusiastic young PMs who are excited to be granted the structure of a PMO and the ability to assist in the building. The first thing we did was decide on the mission of this PMO. Only one of my team was with me but we ran the result by the other and made some adjustments to come up with this:

The QPharma PMO will improve Project Management by:

  1. Prioritizing internal projects
  2. Authorizing baselines
  3. Communicating progress
  4. Managing change control
  5. Managing interdependencies
  6. Distributing templates
  7. Training Senior Staff, Project Managers and Team Members
  8. Facilitating monthly steering committee meetings
  9. Managing RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies)
  10. Tracking financials
  11. Assessing completed deliverables
  12. Storing documents and lessons learned

I typed this up and distributed it to my team and the company owner. No complaints so far!