PMO Creation - Week 5

This week we worked on more of the templates and Mike got the change control system working within SharePoint.

I started choosing members of the steering committee. My preference was to have representation from all the functions of our organization. So I started with IT, Operations, Finance, Quality, Marketing and IT QA.

I immediately received resistance from the CEO who wanted a small team. He saw no reason to include anyone other than IT and IT QA. He isn't understanding that projects from other areas are taking resources away from the IT projects he cares so much about. But he trusts me and is willing to give it a try in the first meeting.

Meanwhile he argued with me on some of the PMO rules so I adjusted them a little, mostly to give him veto power over some steering committee decisions:

The QPharma PMO will abide by the following rules and norms:

1. The PMO will operate under full transparency, sharing information with all interested parties
2. Escalation principles will be published and followed
3. Nobody works on projects past the research phase until the project is authorized by the steering committee
4. Projects can be authorized outside the steering committee meetings by approval of a majority of members – or just by PDB.
5. All projects within commercial operations require a charter. Professional operations can use a Statement of Work or Signed Contract as their charter
6. Project Managers will hold weekly status meetings with their teams that last 30 minutes or less
7. Project Managers will use Earned Value calculations to report on budget – commercial projects will use hours rather than dollars to determine Earned Value.
8. Project Managers will provide a weekly status report to the PMO every Wednesday – status reports should be updated weekly and available always on SharePoint.
9. Schedules require level of effort to be calculated for each activity
10. The PMO will provide a monthly dashboard showing all project status to the steering committee prior to their monthly
11. The steering Committee will meet monthly
12. Change control will be managed by the steering committee. The PMO head will facilitate the steering committee but the signatures of the majority of members or Pat DenBoer are required to approve a project change
13. PMO will meet weekly every Friday at 10 AM
14. Bruce will publish PMO status reports via e-mail and place them on SharePoint
15. PMO members will obtain their PMP certification by the end of 2014