By Florin Gheorghiu, PMP

Editor’s note:  This is not a case study in the academic sense, but rather an essay by a PM professional in Romania who is experiencing first hand the challenges of implementing a Project Management Office (PMO).  We thought it useful to share his thoughts through the case study section of PM World Today.  If you have comments, please contact editor@pmforum.org.

It is obvious that the Project Management (PM) profession has become a globally recognized occupation and more and more companies, small and middle enterprises, consultancy firms, entities within educational field, are struggling to take a share in this widespread effort.  Many are providing guidance, specific templates, tools, software and some other culture shaping instruments to assist the Project Manager in performing his/her assigned tasks.

There are currently two basic options for paving the Company’s road to creating a veritable Project Management culture and attitude: first and most commonly seen is to employ Consulting services which in return for some capital expenditure and a big portion of personnel’s time assigned to daily duties are ready to develop tailor-made methodologies, tools, templates, books and to create the needed mechanisms for a corporation to act as subordinating the Project Management tactics to wider strategic goals. It is a thus a “follow-the-tracks” approach used by many Romanian companies which are not a combination of foreign companies acting in the country or subsidiaries of those as such. Organizations established some 5-10 years ago or sometimes even younger resort to this method; they hire a reputed consultant to help them accessing the rocky road of PM culture and tactics. The most common misconception is that they believe once the process of validating one custom made in-house methodology derived from either PMBoK Standard, PRINCE 2 or TenStep methodologies is completed, the Executives are eagerly waiting for tangible results to come out and visible outputs to be noticed soon.

There is a lack of clear understanding of the fact that PM culture is more than tools, templates, tricks and tips and that soon the expenditures made with consulting services may be made worthless.

Read complete paper in English

Top of Page