For optimum performance from a divisional- or enterprise-level ("strategic") project office, attention must be paid to gathering the right people with the right skills and allocating the right responsibilities. In particular, successful SPOs develop clear relationships with, and roles for, executives.
Project failure rates are falling, cost and time overruns are down, and large companies have made the most dramatic improvement. Three factors explain these encouraging results: 1) a trend toward smaller, less complex projects; 2) better project management; and 3) greater use of "standard infrastructures"such as those instituted through a Project Office. Large companies show up as more successful in the study cited above for one simple reason, in our view: large companies lead the pack in the establishment of enterprise-level or Strategic Project Offices.
With a Strategic Project Office, executive management can get the big picture of all project activity across the enterprise from a central source; project priority can be judged according to a standard set of criteria, and projects can at last fulfill their promise as agents of enterprise strategy.
To effectively deploy project management throughout an organization, all the players must be on board. That's why the most effective project offices are at the corporate level, providing data on total corporate funding for projects, the resources utilized across all corporate projects, capital requirements for projects at the corporate level, materials impact, supplies impact and the procurement chain impacts. When corporate executives can effectively prioritize projects and make fact-based decisions about initiation, funding, and resources, they are in a position to apply systems theory to their organization: to optimize the system (corporation) as a whole, rather than just tinkering with the parts (projects and departments). |
