Creating the project office 4. This is a book about improving organizational performance by implementing a project office system that develops project management as a core competency and thus adds value to the organization. A project office consists of a team dedicated to improving the practice of project management in the organization. The improvement in organizational performance is achieved by obtaining more value from projects, making project management a standard management practice, and then moving the organization toward the enterprise project management concept | 8 Creating the Project Office The tale we tell Establish sense of urgency clear danger Make change stick new PBO culture V Staff and operate In or out Leading Or ganizational Change to PBO Create guiding coalition powerful forces Develop vision and strategy focus Develop broad-based action keep moving implementing Communicate the change vision tell the tale Manage the change short-term wins broad-based action consolidate gains Some readers may feel like Dante facing an unknown ordeal to achieve success that can only be imagined. Many obstacles appear like beasts along the dark path. You too look for a guide and a way to reach the top of the mountain and have found one here. Unlike Dante however you will need to enlist others to join you in the quest no one can carry a project office alone. Many organizations have attempted to improve their abilities and project management over the last decade. Much of this attempt met with limited success. People were sent out to be trained as project managers only to find that when they returned to the organization they were not allowed to perform in the way they were trained. As people and organizations discovered that the individual training approach was not leading to improvements there arose a movement where a person or group of people in the organization were charged with or charged up about systematically improving project management practice across the entire organization thus helping the organization to change to an enterprise project management system. This venturesome group has any number of names including a Project Management Initiative or a Project Management Center of Excellence with the umbrella name project office currently in vogue. As these groups became successful they found that more of their effort was associated with organizational change than with the practice of project management itself. Thus these groups became primary change agents either self-proclaimed or assigned for the process of implementing .
