Today most Turkish energy companies are project-based organizations. They are involved in several different projects within their organization. From building new power capacity such as coal fired and hydro plants, wind farms, new IT systems, implementing a risk management framework and setting up a new trading organization.

All these and other projects should be managed through unified, solid project management methodologies and procedures. The risk of failure in projects is notoriously high as around 50% of all projects do not meet original budget or schedule estimates or are missing critical scope elements, while 25% of the projects will never reach completion at all.

You can significantly increase the success rate of your projects to an impressive 90% by establishing a so-called Project Management Office (PMO). The mission of a PMO will be to establish consistently followed practices for the initiation, planning, execution, control, and closure of all your projects. These practices will not occur spontaneously in nature. They must be carefully crafted, effectively communicated, and delicately enforced. The successful PMO must manage organizational resistance to change. From experience I know how difficult it is to implement a PMO and get its authority and practices accepted by the organization.

Let’s take a look at a real life example from my own consulting practice. Within company X there are already several projects in progress. All with their own project managers with their own project teams. These people are very well capable of managing their particular project from beginning to the end. But most of them will do this in an isolated way and will not look at the unforeseen impacts of their decisions on the other projects in the portfolio of their company. The first thing that we did was establishing a PMO with the support of the Board and Senior management. Without this backing it would be very difficult to get the authority of the PMO accepted by the project managers and their teams. Implementing a PMO structure should be treated like a project itself. It is also something that does not happen overnight. So initially the PMO did have a limited management and staff, but it did grow in size organically over time.

The initial tasks of the PMO could be:

• Maintain the project management standards and procedures, and promote their use within the organization;
• Providing templates for project reports;
• Establish a library of best practices and lessons learned from past projects;
• Providing project management software.

The bottom line is that by implementing a PMO your project success rate will improve significantly as a result. However, there is no blueprint that you can lay on your organization, as each company is unique with its own requirements. It will be our pleasure to share our expertise in establishing PMOs and project management with you as well.

Last changed: 04/08/2013 at 12:43 pm