Atekpc - Pmo Management

Executive Summary

AtekPC is the crossroads of setting up and implementing a Project Management Office for managing their processes more efficiently. It was believed that executing a PMO would result in both projects cost management and improve resources’ capabilities. AtekPC’s CIO Strider is faced with the deciding the direction and implementation of PMO, solving the number of issues facing and threatening the very existence of PMO.

Issues

Industry changes- PC industry was going through rapid changes in terms of both customization and price components. AtekPC was facing stiff price competition not only from major manufactures like Dell and IBM, but also from other Chinese manufactures who were gaining traction. So, AtekPC needed to formulate some cost efficiency methods to survive and compete in the existing market.

PMO Management-PMO office which was believed to improve the process efficiencies at AtekPC was facing numerous issues in terms of authority, resources allocation and whether to go with heavy PMO or light PMO models. In terms of authority concerns were to take a top bottom or bottom up hierarchical approach. Heavy PMO or light PMO were to be decided on the resource allocations to the PMO recruited internally, externally or both depending on the implementation of PMO. Some of the top management believes that going with a heavy PMO will benefit AtekPC, whereas Strider believes and wants to get the buy-in from all the stakeholders that a light PMO would be a better choice. Alternatively, he is also ready to meet half way to reach consensus. Plan is to implement PMO in IT department first and then taking to enterprise level, but to what level the IT department will be ready to embrace it would be the key question?

Employees/Customers buy-in- Biggest Challenge facing PMO in AtekPC was getting the required buy in from employees internally and customers externally, essentially from all the stakeholders. Strider, did not want to implement PMO from an authoritan point of view, rather was expecting all the stakeholders to understand the advantages of having a PMO in place. In a competitive landscape like the one which the company was facing, it is difficult to implement changes and get buy-in especially from customers-who might move onto competitors if they are not convinced by the implementation of PMO.

Governance- PMO governance was the next issue which the company was facing during the same time. Strider was worried that there were no metrics in place to measure the performance of PMO and its impact on the business process improvement over a period of time. Then there were other roadblocks such as even if PMO was improving cost efficiencies, sometimes because of the hierarchical functioning of AtekPC, it would be a daunting task to accurately measure the success of the PMO program.

Alternatives

Training- As a first alternative, formulating an official mandatory training program across the functions on the PMO implementation would remove the ambiguity and increase the transparency from the top management to the program flag bearers, who actually implement it. Training modules can also