Avenu is pleased to announce the official organization of our Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO is a team dedicated to getting projects off the ground from kick-off meeting through the completion of contract requirements by consistently using established standards across the board.
What Does the PMO Provide?
Best practices and standards across the entire company.
Planning, monitoring, tracking, and documenting of all project activities, risks, and needs.
Tangible, repeatable processes for managing projects.
Tools and templates to assist in managing projects.
Resources, methodologies, and techniques for project success across the enterprise.
Coaching, training, and oversight for project managers.
Project status communication to clients and internal stakeholders, including the Executive Team and Board of Directors.
What are the benefits of a centralized PMO?
Increased Accuracy: The PMO helps to increase the accuracy of projects in terms of the budget, resources, and schedule. By being accurate and more predictable, projects are less likely to fail, be delayed or over budget.
Cost Savings: Increase accuracy will reduce the chances of changes needing to be made. Making changes to projects often leads to spending more money on unanticipated items that are not budgeted.
Established standards: The PMO ensures we have and enforce established standards across the board. This will lead to an improvement in project management execution and uniformity of our projects.
Greater Project Control: The PMO sets and assists in implementing project management best practices, processes, procedures, and effective communication.
Unified Resource Assistance: The PMO can assist a Business Unit (BU) with PM resourcing issues. By centrally managing the company’s Project Managers (PMs), the PMO can monitor and maximize the utilization of our project managers and assign project management assistance to BUs when needed.
Centralized Reporting: The PMO has an overall view of all projects and therefore can provide the leadership team with information on a host of areas such as planning and control.
Satisfied Clients. Executing projects on-time and within budget will lead to clients who are happy with Avenu’s solutions and services.
How will the Avenu PMO Work?
Project Managers (PMs) will report directly to Elliot Norman, PMO Leader. This will allow for greater oversight across projects and project management leadership and support to the PMs. It also allows them to receive training, mentorship, and support from their peers and from the PMO.
BU leaders will remain in control of project priorities and resources. The BU leader is responsible for customer success and prioritizing where project resources are deployed. The Project Manager will continue to work closely with the BU leader to review project status, needs and risks.
Support given to a customer or BU operations that fall outside of a Project Manager’s typical responsibilities (e.g., RFP / customer support / etc.) will continue. The PMO and BU leaders will work together to define the duties assigned to the PMs and the PMs will be empowered to plan the execution of those duties. If volume increases, and the PM is not able to successfully complete all duties, the PMO and BU leaders will work together to prioritize and/or provide additional resources.
Project Managers deployed over multiple projects will work with the BU leaders and PMO to ensure project needs are met. Where PMs are managing more than one project, whether within one BU or across multiple, they will work closely with the BU leaders and PMO to plan upcoming tasks and initiatives to ensure the needs of each project are being met.
BUs will receive additional Project Management support in peak times. By introducing common practices, procedures, and tools, as well as centralizing utilization, the PMO will be able to deploy PMs to projects or BUs who may need additional support or resources during peak times of activity.
The PMO will provide and assist with the implementation of standard tools, templates, and processes to PMs. A working group of PMs across the company will meet weekly to review and shape the processes and tools being used by the different BUs. The goal is to create a standard set of processes, procedures and standards that can be followed by everyone (where appropriate). Training will be provided to all PMs as needed.
Using project status reports and one-on-one check-ins, PMs will report project status to the PMO. This will allow the PMO to collate status, risks and issues across projects and BUs to provide the Executive Team and Board of Directors the type of information they need to guide the direction of the company.
Working with BU leaders, the PMO will review current and upcoming project needs to determine the best approach for staffing new projects. This will be done by assessing current and future project needs and PM utilization. To allow PMs to maximize their institutional knowledge, and to simplify cost/budgeting, priority will be given to the PMs home BU first. From a budgetary perspective, they will remain in their home BU.
Support given to a customer or BU operations that fall outside of a Project Manager’s typical responsibilities (e.g., RFP / customer support / etc.) will continue. The PMO and BU leaders will work together to define the duties assigned to the PMs and the PMs will be empowered to plan the execution of those duties. If volume increases, and the PM is not able to successfully complete all duties, the PMO and BU leaders will work together to prioritize and/or provide additional resources.