INTRODUCTION

As the PMO begins to influence the organization and provide value, members of the project and program management community should begin to recognize the PMO as a center of excellence for project and program management within the organization. As time passes, members of the project and program management community will likely begin to come to the PMO with questions regarding project and program management practices and organizational standards as well as for assistance with project issues. This is clearly a desired outcome. The PMO should assume an active role in addressing these areas and as such should recognize itself as a consulting organization, albeit primarily as consultants to the internal staff rather than external organizations. In a consulting capacity, the PMO may operate in one or more of the following consulting domains:

• Project and process consulting

• Mentoring

• Project staff augmentation and active project management

Project and process consulting represents the traditional consulting role of providing advice and guidance to support others in the delivery of a relevant objective. This consulting role might include assisting with project workshops, assessing troubled projects and providing guidance to improve results, or answering questions from the PMO s constituents on PMO processes and standards or general questions in the realm of project and program management. Mentoring, an extremely powerful and often underutilized component of consulting, involves providing continuous guidance and coaching to members of the organization by pairing senior project or program managers with junior members in...