Project Management Office Analysis
When I worked as a web developer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, I acted as both the developer and project manager for my projects. There were about 20-24 individual projects that were being developed concurrently by a team of 6 developers. The manager of our group acted as the sole member of the project management office (sometimes called a project office). She has her PMP certification, so I’m sure she knows many of the concepts I’m learning, and they helped her manage the direction of the projects including project selection. I’m not sure if there was an official PMO at the institution, but I would have to assume so. If not, they would greatly benefit from creating standards and making sure that the individual departments best used their project management resources.
From my experience in my department, either the manager of the team or a separate project manager handled the functions of a PMO. I think that a central PMO office would have been greatly beneficial to myself in terms of learning project management beyond the classroom. It would have helped in the project selection and closing stages. In my projects, I made sure to develop a list of stakeholders, charter, scope of work, and have the scope signed off on, so it was clear when the project was completed. Other team members didn’t have a background in project management and were effected by scope creep. If there was a centralized office that helped manage projects, they might have been able to prevent those challenges from the beginning of the project.
From a management viewpoint, it would be useful to have a list of what projects everyone in the institution was working on, how resources were allocated to them, and how they impact the yearly goals. This way projects could be re-allocated based on priority.
