Enterprise Pmo

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe a sustaining innovation that I would propose to my organization. Without innovation, healthcare service costs will continue to rise faster than the rest of the economy.

In health care, innovations in the way services and systems are designed are likely to be just as important (and probably more so) than any specific innovative product or service. It is important to consider project management innovations as 'services', since the software has limited or no functionality on their own. The largest performance gains from these innovations are likely to come from service reconfiguration or through changes in skill-mix and role specialization that could, for example, promote technology-assisted remote triage and caseload management as a way of reducing costly admissions and promoting client independence. The key innovation is the ability to provide a personalized and customized service that meets the needs of the industry and users, patients and carriers. The project management office provides a tool (or process) for enabling the innovation to happen.

Various visioning and discovering tools to develop the innovation are discussed, and an analysis of their effectiveness is provided. This paper concludes with recommendations for establishing a PMO at XXX.

2. Introduction

The past decade has seen a dramatic upsurge in the visibility and status of project management within organizations. Increasingly, research data supports this fundamental principle: unless all the projects that a company engages in are conceptualized, planned, executed, closed out, and archived in a systematic manner, it will be impossible for that organization to keep a handle on which activities add value and which merely drain resources. Establishing a PMO as a home base for project managers and project management is a must for organizations to move from doing a less-than-adequate job of managing projects on an individual basis to creating the organizational synergy around projects that adds value, dependably and repeatable. Given that a majority of organizations are now investing in PMOs, how can we structure and implement them to ensure that they deliver the value that these times demand?

3. PMO Value Proposition: A Sustaining Derivative -type Innovation

Many organizations jumped onto the project management bandwagon without fully thinking through their initiative and establishing a game plan. Often they approached bringing project management into their organization by implementing software tools or launching a training program. The frequent failure of such one-dimensional approaches has shown that implementing project management is a multi-faceted initiative that involves a combination of processes, skills building, enabling tools, as well as organizational change agents. Success requires the management, coordination, and sponsorship of a PMO, ideally one that is seated at the strategic, enterprise level. Yet merely establishing a PMO isn't enough. Laying a solid groundwork gives the organization a head start towards developing the mature PMO practices that lead to business success.

Sustaining innovations may be classified in the innovation spectrum as either a variation or a derivative. Establishing a PMO for XXX is classified as a sustaining derivative -type for the following reasons. First, only a minor modification to XXX's business strategy is necessary to measure its success. Since improved project margins are expected by lowering project implementation and delivery costs, the innovation helps to extend the company's current success formula. Second, the innovation is supported by internal and external stakeholders. Preliminary results of a marketing survey to prospective clients as well as internal stakeholders show universal acceptance. Third, the innovation is targeted within the existing plane of competition (the PBM industry). In addition, the PBM industry is mature, and providing a project management methodology in delivering services represents an incremental process improvement to what is already considered a mature service delivery model. Fourth, the process innovation is focused on operational excellence. Using the PMO governance model can empower an organization's

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