TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 6 will address the role of the PMO as a standards organization. Standardization may include defining and enforcing uniform project management processes across the organization, utilizing standard tools and templates to perform project management tasks, or maintaining standardized management reporting or project tracking mechanisms to ensure a uniform view of projects, progress, and issues across the organization that the PMO influences. The benefits of standardization are significant. From a project execution standpoint, standardization ensures that a uniform set of practices is available to guide project managers in the delivery of projects, reducing the amount of time project managers spend developing tools to assist with management of projects and ensuring that project managers across the organization are operating within a framework that supports management reporting needs and promotes utilizing best practices. From a management perspective, standardization ensures that uniform data is captured and reported to facilitate summarized management reporting and that mechanisms can be developed to accurately track the status of projects across the organization and to ensure processing uniformity. Four areas of standardization will be examined in Chapter 6:
Project management standards
Project management toolsets
Project portfolio management
Project reporting
Within each of these areas, an overview of the goals of standardization and expected benefits that can be achieved through implementing change will be discussed, along with practical guidance on developing manageable solutions to address standards challenges within the project management and PMO contexts.
Before considering the...
