Upholding project management standards by addressing core issues of PMO operations

In addition to defining and maintaining project management standards, the PMO is the source of documentation, guidance and metrics for the project management practice across the business. This implies creating a streamlined approach to the way projects are governed and maintaining effective discipline across all project activities. Therefore, project governance and project management discipline are at the core of the PMO.

The PMO has the expertise to devise standards and best practices, however, the biggest challenges arise in the operational sense. Implementing and maintaining optimal levels of consistency of project management practices is a challenging operational task and frequently disposed to nonconformity.

We are all aware of a number of chronic reasons that cause it: rules get too complicated to follow; steep learning curves; cultural resistance; weak endorsement of the introduced methodologies; external contracting staff etc…

In order to succeed, implementation and maintenance of project practices has to be straightforward, simple to follow and easy to use.

The PMO can significantly reduce the operational stress and focus on adding value instead of remaining in operational maintenance mode.

Addressing the challenges: Welcome to PM Box

PM Box software suite is designed to effectively address the issues of core mechanics of PMO operations. Its purpose is to help you successfully standardise your environment, including PM practices and team collaboration on projects. PM Box contains a number of features to address common challenges in delivering strategic objectives. 

Making PMBOK^® work for you

PM Box assists standardisation by allowing PMOs to tailor the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^®) to suit your own business model. PM Box makes the following customisations possible:

1. Selecting individual PMBOK project activities relevant to your project(s) - Given PMBOK is very comprehensive and seldom used in its entirety, it becomes more effective when tailored to your needs
2. Managing relations and consequential actions between project activities - As recommended in the PMBOK guide (or by the PMO), your project model will encapsulate the relations and consequential actions between individual project tasks
3. Associating a project task with a document, a tool or related information - Project managers are automatically presented with the correct document, tool or information for a given project activity

Customisation of project activities (task > tool > consequence) via PM Box helps create best practice principles that not only guide the project manager through due process but also simplify carrying out common project tasks.

PM Box stores all customisations inside project blueprints (or “classes”) designed to address typical project scenarios. When launching a new project, PMO simply selects the most suitable model and all principles embedded inside the project blueprints are cloned into the new working project providing peace of mind the project is running within set guidelines.

Effective collaboration with auto-generated SharePoint^® project sites

PM Box enables effective team collaboration by operating in unity with Microsoft^® SharePoint^®, fully automating the entire site creation process for new projects, without any intervention from IT. Compared to delivering SharePoint sites in a conventional way, PM Box automated site creation saves large amounts of time and resources and speeds up project set ups significantly.

All PM Box SharePoint sites are standardised and come pre-packaged with a set of tools for the project teams (such as document libraries, calendars, scheduling tool, issue tracker, project registers, announcements, discussion board, etc...). Site structure and layout are carefully planned and designed to provide clean, easy to use interface for each member of the project team, improving team communication and encouraging more effective collaboration.

Well-structured and organised sites eliminate confusion about project documentation and provide a predictable collaborative environment integrating well with existing Microsoft Office products, requiring little or no additional training to be used effectively.

Documentation standards: From template management to knowledge bases

All documents generated via PM Box are based on standardised document templates fully controlled by the PMO. Each document has an essential set of metadata associated enabling easy file classification and more relevant search results. To maintain document consistency and address project documentation variations, PM Box allows the PMO to manage all document templates from a central location.