PMO Practice Head: Driving Delivery Of All Projects

This entry is part 8 of 12 in the series Tech Company Casestudy

Program Management

As the sales grew, the need for integrated solutions increased. This increased the number of projects involving multiple groups. Also for product within the same group, the influence and dependency of open source increased. So the need for synchronizing releases increased. Also the external partners increased. So did the outsourcing. All these increased the complexity of execution. The product development and release was no more confined to 4-5 people teams.

Hence the need for program managers. As the number of program managers increased, the operational load increased. Thus grew the need for PMO.

Quality Process Management

There was initiative of common organization process. Organization process aspects such as CMMI, agile SCRUM deployment etc.There were quality engineers whose job is to evangelize this in projects and organization culture.

Customers in some of the industries mandated quality standards on their vendors. These had both technical (features. ‘what part’) and process ( the way it is developed. the ‘how part’).

The Role

Program management and process deployment combined under one practice head served important purpose – The power (to deploy process) and responsibility (to deliver products, solutions and services) were well balanced.

The Head of PMO leads the above practice. As the Practice Head he reports to Engineering VP just like R&D Directors.

In this past experience, PMO Head has done hands on project management in many projects in many different industries. He has led software product releases, old economic engineering software, turn key projects.. This brings great deal of credibility to what he says. Otherwise, quality was considered a dry subject and he is able to command compliance with the skills he acquired over years.

Upon discussion with Engineering Director, he assigns the program manager to OVES. He was confident that the this program manager can work together with the tough Engineering Managers in video group.

Many organizations have separate quality and PMOs. I am curious to know experiences in both of these models. What worked and what did not work.. anything to share ?

 

Series Navigation<< Engineering Director: Accountability for R&D ManagementEngineering Manager: The Job of Line Management >>
0 0 vote
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments