Tjahjana L., Dwyer P., Habib M. The program management office advantage: a powerful and centralized way for organizations to manage projects

AMACOM, 2009. – 289 p. – ISBN: 0814414265, 9780814414262For FAS Inc., a large financial advisory firm in downtown Boston, having hundreds of projects running at the same time is the norm. In other words, for CEO David Strassen and the senior project man- agers, Kerry Murphy and Bill Clements, having a headache is a part of their daily routine. As Bill puts it, Every day, I have to play a game with my fellow project managers called ‘beg for bodies.’ In this game we meet and allocate our department staff to project teams. We use a spreadsheet to do this. The sheet tells us that we are overallocating everyone. It also tells us that even if they were available, we are out of budget. But still we play the game. They all feel that their projects are always restricted by cost, time, and available resources—ticking time bombs that can explode at any time. When failure is not an option, the pressure to successfully complete the projects takes its toll on some of the project managers.
Does the situation sound familiar to you? If yes, then a Program Management Office (PMO) might be the solution to your problem. This book introduces the concept of having a centralized office that manages the running of multiple projects at the same time and that has the aim of achieving an optimum performance for the whole or- ganization. Throughout this book, we will draw examples from FAS Inc., which is based on a real-life company, so that we can learn from its experience in finding project solutions through the PMO.