The Standish report finds that companies with PMOs generally do not fare any better then those companies without PMOs. The author of the Standish survey thinks the PMOs are too focused on bureaucracy.

The way that the project team is organized is directly related to the way the entire organization is structured. There are three major organization structures to manage work and people.

In a perfect world, your project schedule and completion dates would be derived based on the amount of work to be done and the number of resources available. As you know, that is not always the case. Sometimes when the project is assigned, it already has a targeted end date.

There are two reasons to create a Discovery Project. For very large projects, the planning work can become very lengthy and unfocused. Planning the work for very large projects may take enough time that it should be structured as a project itself. This is one reason to define a separate Discovery Project.

Most organizations tend to manage large projects in a similar way. This repeatable approach can be used, re-used and improved over time. However, there is not just one way to manage large projects. Different organizations use different models. People that work in the same organizations for a long time may not realize the multitude of approaches that can be used.

Schedules are the way you estimate the work, resources and durations for your project. One way to manage schedule risk for large projects is through the Monte Carlo modeling. Here is an example to demonstrate Monte Carlo. The example is simple, but it requires some focus for it to make sense.

Why is it that most of us don’t have a problem working 40-50+ hours a week taking care of our stakeholder’s needs, and yet we have difficulty writing a decent status report? Yes, some people simply do not have great written communication skills. However, in most cases, the problems with communication are not a lack of skills, but a lack of focus.

Many Project Management Offices (PMOs) spend quite a bit of time deploying common project management practices in their organization and building project management skills in their staff. But is it working? The PMO can validate whether their work is sticking through project assessments.

When you create a schedule you generally don’t know enough to enter all of the detailed activities the first time in sequential order. Instead, you identify large chunks of work first, and then break the larger chunks into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces are, in turn, broken down into still smaller and more discrete activities. This technique is referred to as creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

It can be hard to compare and prioritize the projects in your portfolio because there are many different types of projects. Some projects might increase revenue, some might decrease costs and some might help build internal capability. All of them have some benefit but it may not be easy to know which ones are the most valuable and which ones are the most aligned to your goals and strategies.