Creating the project office 6. 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 | 28 Creating the Project Office will be impossible. Changing systems is also difficult as much has been invested in current systems and the people who run them probably favor the status quo. Finally getting the support of department directors has been notoriously difficult over the history of the project management movement. It is here that many change processes fail. Even when procedures have proven to be effective and the necessary skills have been developed the structures systems and supervisors do not yield to change and the process fails. For this reason we opened this chapter with the reference to Dante. The sign over the door to Hell warned him to abandon hope. Yet we believe there is reason instead to abandon despair there is a process and help to address the difficult issues. Phase 3 Making Change Stick By this point in the change process the value of moving to enterprise project management has probably been proven many times over. Project managers have been well trained mentored and supported and good project manager practice has become the norm. It may seem that the new practices have taken root and now define the way things are done in the organization. However experience indicates that this is not necessarily true. Old habits die hard and the old culture lies just below the surface constantly ready to reassert itself. Kotter 1996 pp. 145-147 described an aerospace company where a five-year change process yielded an increase in revenues of 62 percent and an increase in net income of 76 percent. The driver of the change the division general manager retired feeling that the changes had been made the results impressive and the work had been done. Very soon many of the changes that were put in place began to unravel many small adjustments were made mostly imperceptible. Within twenty-four months some practices had regressed to where they had been four years before. Shortly thereafter the first major performance problems began to emerge. Kotter argues that .
