Creating the project office 28. 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 | Pathway to Organizational Change 10. Refreeze Looking forward Unfreeze This chapter completes the process of transforming the organization to enterprise project management. It answers the question of how to make the change stick and embed enterprise project management into the culture so that the principles become habits for everyone. Dennis Cohen presents a sample intervention program and framework that suggest a combination of action areas on which to focus Leadership Learning Means and Motivation. These areas are then applied to the important success factors necessary to support enterprise project management. Y CHAPTER TEN LOOKING FORWARD EMBEDDING PROJECT PRACTICES IN THE CULTURE OF THE ORGANIZATION Dennis Cohen Strategic Management Group Once the project office begins to fully implement fundamental changes in the organization to support successful projects a new problem emerges that is often ignored. The problem is how to consolidate the changes and prevent the company from sliding back to business as usual the former steady state. Anyone who has been involved in large-scale organization change is always amazed at the resiliency of the old ways of doing things. Given the slightest misstep or the momentary drop in vigilance what once seemed to be a successful change quickly slips back to the way things were. In this chapter we focus on a number of methods to prevent this from happening. They are based on transforming the fundamental nature of the PMO from center of excellence into cultural change agent. As a center of excellence the PMO is primarily the facilitator of a set of tools and techniques to run projects programs and project portfolios and the sponsor of a set of competencies for project managers to effectively use the tools and techniques. As a cultural change agent the PMO becomes the sponsor of project management as a core business process. This requires increasing the breadth and depth of project management so that project practices reach all .
