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The Project Management Office as an Organizational Strategy

Deborah A. Lauriano, Assistant Director

Joyce M. Johnstone, Project Manager

Information Resources
University of California, Davis

ABSTRACT

The University of California, Davis (UCD) is a Research I institution, with an enrollment of 23,600 undergraduates, graduate, and professional students.

It is clear that the demand for technological services in the coming years will outpace any organization�s resources and ability to provide them. Efforts to build static organizational structures will not be effective, given the sheer rate of change in our institutions. Measures of success will depend on cross-functional teams, who form to solve a problem, disband, and reform again to solve the next problem.

The establishment of a Project Management Office (PMO) coupled with the use of project management tenets is one strategy to control the onslaught of demand for new initiatives. While functional managers focus on the health of the organization, relationship management, maintenance, and long-term resource issues, the Project Management Office can be deployed to systematically manage the cycle of cross-functional teams who are brought together on a temporary basis to deliver technical projects on-time and within budget.

This presentation will discuss:

The Project Management Office as an Organizational Strategy

Introduction

It is clear that the demand for technological services in the coming years will outpace any organization�s resources and ability to provide them. Efforts to build static organizational structures will not be effective, given the sheer rate of change in our institutions. Measures of success will depend on cross-functional teams, who form to solve a problem, disband, and reform again to solve the next problem.

At the University of California, Davis, the Project Management Office (PMO) is one strategy that is used to control the onslaught of demand for new initiatives. While functional managers focus on the health of the organization, relationship management, maintenance, and long-term resource issues, the Project Management Office is deployed to systematically manage the cycle of cross-functional teams who are brought together on a temporary basis to deliver technical projects on-time and within budget.

Situation Overview

The University of California, Davis (UCD) is a Research I institution, with an enrollment of 23,600 undergraduates, graduate, and professional students. A restructuring of technical support units in 1993 combined academic, administrative and infrastructure computing under the leadership of the Associate Vice Chancellor of Information Technology.

A new Student Information System implementation was occurring in parallel with this restructuring. This implementation was severely challenged because of scope and procedural problems. With the help of outside consulting, which focused on establishing project management practices and mentorship of staff, this project was delivered on-time and within budget.

The student information system initiative was soon followed by others including:

Increasingly, initiatives seem to share certain characteristics.

Initiatives utilize more than one technology. Client server architectures, and distributed technologies mandate increased consideration of network protocols, file delivery systems, security methods which match the security delivered by mainframes, desktop software configuration, server software configuration, etc. Further, expertise in these areas cannot be found in one authoritative source.

Subject matter expertise crosses functional boundaries. Not only is it impossible to find one authoritative source of technical expertise, the experts are spread throughout the institution, in different functional and business areas. This is also true for business matter experts. Our systems and our business practices are integrated across organizational boundaries more than ever before.

Customers of single initiatives represent a wide variety of business requirements, and differing levels of comfort with change. Because our systems and business practices are integrated across organizational boundaries, customers of a single initiative have differing business goals, varying frequency of use, and differing levels of satisfaction with systems which may or may not have been designed with their local use as a priority. Additionally, customers not comfortable with frequent change are suffering from what UCD calls "change burnout".

There were a number of organizational challenges that were evidenced in our initiatives.

There was a lack of ownership and accountability in developing solutions. The spread of expertise across functional and business boundaries, the integration of different technologies made it difficult to assign ownership and accountability.

Full assessment of risk rarely took place. The lack of a single authoritative source of expertise, the distribution of expertise across functional boundaries, and the varieties of business goals made it difficult to accurately assess risk and impact. Architectural changes in one project would often negatively impact other efforts or break existing operational systems.

There was no formally recognized mechanism to join constituencies together to provide collaborative solutions. Our static organizational structure did not encourage collaboration. Workgroups proved to have limited success. Roles and expectations were not formally defined, making it easy to deny responsibility in a group structure. Workgroup assignments came in addition to normal job duties, making it difficult to bring efforts in on a schedule. Assigning functional managers to manage these initiatives also proved to be less than optimal for these same workload issues. Additionally, workgroup chairs and functional managers rarely had the skills to organize and lead members to repeatable successes.

Establishment and Benefits of the Project Management Office as an Organizational Strategy

UCD�s desire to repeat the success of the Student Information System Implementation in its initiatives raised the question of how to inject project management best practices into our efforts, while not burdening functional managers in the face of their increasing operational challenges. Our conclusion was to establish a pool of project managers who could be deployed to manage a wide range of technically oriented projects.

The Project Management Office as an organizational strategy provided many solutions to the problems we faced.

A group of technicians were solicited from the ranks to form the Project Management Office that exists as a unit within the larger department on the organizational chart. These individuals regularly take classes in project management best practices in order to increase their skills. Additionally, we have successfully used mentoring as a way of training junior members. We are currently formalizing mentorship so that it can be used repeatedly. This relieves the burden on functional managers to develop these specific skills. The formalization of the Project Management Office as a separate unit helps to convey strategic importance of project management to the rest of the organization.

We have formalized the project management approach. Housing the project managers in one unit has encouraged the use of templates, best practices, and common tools. Project managers use these common tools to initiate projects, secure resources from functional managers, communicate expectations, roles, and assigned tasks to team members, and to obtain commitment from team members. For team members who have experience on more than one project, these methods have become familiar, and even expected.

We have provided a formal mechanism to bring resources from different functional areas to provide solutions. The project manager is specifically charged with identifying required resources during the planning phase. This phase includes securing a formal commitment from proposed team members and their management for their participation on the project.

Authority and responsibility are assigned at the project level. The management of our organization is brought in at project initiation to formalize the role and authority of project managers, as project managers are charged with the responsibility for success in a project. Team members are formally assigned responsibility and authority for the success of components of the project.

Full assessment of risk and impact routinely take place. This is accomplished through the leadership of the technical architect, a role that is specifically responsible for assessing impact. The technical architect takes advantage of the cross-functional project team to address issues of risk and impact. The technical architect is also a member of a campus wide group of project managers and technical architects, whose charge it is to continually assess impact between mission critical systems.

The Role of the Project Management Office

The Project Management Office is responsible for the success of an assigned project. Every project manager knows that with responsibility, should come authority. This is a challenge in UCD�s environment where consensus is a highly valued principle. However, we have found some tools and tactics to enhance our chances for success.

A governance agreement is written and signed by all appropriate parties. The project manager develops this document in collaboration with the project sponsor and functional managers. The governance agreement defines the following:

Team members are assigned to the Project Management Office for the duration of the project. In major projects, where more than 50% of a team member�s time is expected to be on a project, the member is assigned to the Project Management Office for the duration of the project. Theoretically, this means the project manager, and not the functional manager, ultimately makes the decision where a member�s time is to be spent. In reality, this is a negotiated decision. Often, the project manager has a need for a staff member who is not assigned to the team, or a team member who has a less than a 50% appointment. Therefore, it is in the project manager�s and the functional manager�s best interest to negotiate these decisions, and to avoid unilateral decisions.

If expected resources are not available, the governance agreement rules. If a required resource is not available to the project as a result of a management decision, it is incumbent upon the project manager to inform the sponsor of the impact to the project. If the sponsor withholds the resource, the project plan is modified, per the change management process described in the governance agreement.

Sponsor commitment and engagement is not optional. Sponsors may require education regarding their role on a project. The sponsor should be a person who is ultimately responsible for securing resources for the project and is vested in its success. Because lack of sponsor commitment is often sited as one of the primary reasons for project failure, it is one of the main responsibilities of the project manager to regularly communicate issues and status to the sponsor. The sponsor should be responsible for paving the road for project success by:

The Project Management Office provides templates, standards, and guidance on best practices to the campus community. At UCD, the Project Management Office has played the lead role in developing the Administrative Computing Plan. Some of the components of the plan include templates, standards, and a process by which projects should be implemented. Some of the templates and example documents include:

These templates and example documents are stored on the Project Management Office website at http://ir.ucdavis.edu/pmo/.

The Project Management Office assigns a project specialist to each mission critical software project in accordance with UCD�s Administrative Computing Plan. Business offices may decide to use their own internal teams on mission critical software development projects. In these cases the project specialist helps these business units navigate the policy and procedures of implementing a new application, as well as offering assistance throughout the project. This assistance focuses on:

The Project Management Office chairs a committee whose charge it is to manage issues of impact. This group is comprised of the project managers and technical architects of all mission critical systems, including infrastructure. Its charge is to surface and proactively manage issues of impact between the major campus systems. These include business function and processes, as well as technical issues.

The Relationship of the Project Management Office and Functional Managers

The relationship of functional managers and project managers is very similar to a matrix organization. Functional managers are responsible for the long-term development of employees and all Human Resource issues. While the functional manager is responsible for the logistics of performance evaluations, the project manager should provide an evaluation of the employee’s performance on the project. Employees should be fully informed of this process by the functional manager, and the process should be described in the resource allocation governance document.

The process to remove an employee from a project due to performance issues should be developed by the sponsor, the functional manager, and the project manager and described in the resource allocation governance document.

The project sponsor may assign the functional manager to act as the relationship manager between the project and the user community. The functional manager may act as a lead in managing the relationship between the project and the user community. The functional manager often has a long-standing relationship with the community. The project sponsor, the functional manager, and the project manager should work together to leverage this relationship towards the project’s success.

The functional manager should continue to manage the health of the organization. Without the burden of managing projects, functional managers are able to concentrate on operational issues, and other aspects of organizational health such as long-term planning.

Organizational Models of the Project Management Office

At University of California, Davis, the genesis of the Project Management Office evolved out the success of a major application development effort and a number of moderately sized projects internal to Information Resources, a large department within the Office of Information Technology. The Project Management Office is currently a unit within Information Resources.

There are some projects that might benefit by a direct reporting relationship with the Office of Information Technology. A direct reporting relationship would give the unit increased visible authority.

Regardless of the organizational model, the primary factor for success is sponsor commitment to specific projects, and upper level management commitment to the Project Management Office.

The establishment of the Project Management Office at the University of California, Davis, represents a hybrid organizational model in Information Technology. The model combines role-based characteristics and behaviors, within a hierarchical organization.

The hybrid model serves to retain the value of a vertically aligned organization, such as the ability to maintain operations, perform long-term planning, and cultivate client relationships. And it provides some of the advantages of a role-based organization, such as the quick deployment of cross-functional teams, the management of risk and impact across organizational boundaries, and the promotion of the notion of core competencies.

Conclusions

The Project Management Office is one strategy that can be used to:

Functional managers are able to concentrate on management of operational systems and processes, human resource issues, the long-term health of the organization, and long-term relationships with the user community.

Project sponsors focus their efforts on securing the budget, verifying the authority of the Project Management Office, and acting as a liaison to the user community.

The hybrid organizational model, that combines vertical lines of responsibility and authority, with role-based characteristics and behaviors, leverages the best of both models.

This organizational strategy provides one powerful tool in managing critical efforts facing our institutions in the coming years.