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The Chief Project Officer And How One Can Benefit Your Organization
- 1. The Chief Project Officer and How
One Can Benefit Your Organization
Ed Kozak
•
The term Chief Project Officer, or
make sure that every project
supports the right business goals;
CPO, might not be commonly known in • require that every project have an
many industries but it is a term that effective manager or leader in
many organizations should commit to charge;
memory. A CPO is a single individual • implement and maintain an
at the Senior Management level who is appropriate PM methodology;
responsible for providing governance • rigorously and formally manage
over the organization’s internal projects. changes to project scope, budget,
schedule, and requirements;
• group similar projects to manage
Why Project Governance Is Needed them in a similar manner; and
At the Senior Management Level • implement, lead and coordinate
project portfolio management.
Successful organizations in many
industries have discovered, albeit, after- Many have tried to achieve this
the-fact for some, that they need to governance in the past by creating a
enhance the communication between project management office, or PMO, at
Management and their project teams. their sites. Unfortunately for many
This need for governance at a senior organizations, this costly endeavor has
level has grown out of necessity to not been successful, providing limited,
ensure that project teams and internal or no, value. The reason is easy to
investment capital is used strategically. explain. A PMO is not for every
Only someone at the senior level has the organization and few organizations have
authority and wherewithal to link performed due diligence on the PMO to
projects with strategic goals and to reach determine whether it was suitable for
horizontally across departments to them, or whether they were suitable for a
review expenditures and schedules, to PMO. Instead, many saw the benefits
regulate resource utilization, and to that PMOs provided to others—
cancel projects that no longer are in oftentimes lauded in financial or
alignment with strategic objectives. This management journals—and decided that
representation must be able to perform they must implement the same, without
the following tasks: giving careful examination to what
exactly they wanted to achieve.
• link all projects to strategic and
operational business plans; Gerald Kendall and Steven Rollins, in
their book Advanced Project
The Chief Project Officer and How One Can Benefit Your Organization 1
© Successful Projects For Leaders. No portion of this document may be copied or distributed without
the expressed written consent of the author.
- 2. Management and the PMO: Multiplying should relieve them of some of the
ROI At Warp Speed, cite specific reasons responsibilities that they deem to be
why PMOs fail. These are: overly-bureaucratic or tedious, like
planning, documentation, and
• The PMO did not define its monitoring and control—something that
value proposition. PMOs should should never be taken out of the project
strive to demonstrate tangible manager’s hands to perform. So,
value in the first three months in whether it be from internal pressure or
terms of improving project from a willingness to try to capture the
delivery speed. gains other organizations have, many
• The PMO is not perceived as organizations jumped on the business
impacting project delivery process reengineering bandwagon and
abilities created PMOs, only to realize that
• The PMO is seen as a threat — they’re not getting much value from
most often too authoritative them and that support for the PMO is
• The PMO is too low in the waning.
management reporting
structure The ultimate question that the successful
• The PMO does not have buy-in organization must ask is “Does it make
from the senior functional sense?” Does it make sense to create a
managers department and departmental org
• Project Management Overhead structure, complete with possible layers
— the bad PMO acronym of management and administrative help,
to improve the way projects are
• The PMO is micromanaging —
conducted and sustain that level of
trying to control every project
improvement? There are certainly
directly
legitimate reasons for an organization to
have project governance at the senior
Furthermore, they state that, contrary to
level:
one of the reasons why organizations
originally justified the creation of a
PMO, a PMO should not bear the • The organization is highly-
responsibility of project planning, fragmented and functional in
scheduling, risk identification & nature, with difficulty
management, and monitoring & control. coordinating all the team
Too often, individual project managers activities.
feel that a PMO is needed at their • There is a lack of any connection
respective organizations and lobby for between Management and
the creation of one. On one hand, it project groups along with no
provides them with an entity structured, consistent and
knowledgeable about project meaningful flow of information
management that has the ability to make between these two groups.
timely decisions that they feel is above • Individual project teams
their station. However, many project identifying and desiring projects
managers incorrectly also feel that it related to their segments.
The Chief Project Officer and How One Can Benefit Your Organization 2
© Successful Projects For Leaders. No portion of this document may be copied or distributed without
the expressed written consent of the author.
- 3. • Senior management is not able to it would be suitable, whether a start-up
properly prioritize the collective or mature.
initiatives.
• Historically, projects have not For the start-up looking to launch its first
been aligned with strategic product, add to or enhance its existing
objectives to ensure that projects product line, or increase its market
are contributing to growth, penetration, having a CPO on staff
competitive advantage, revenue, makes perfect sense. The responsibility
cash flow, or other objectives of of the CPO would be to see that product
the organization. development schedules are met.
• There is a lack of full-time Consider the huge opportunity costs for
oversight for and across all the company if there were delays in
projects that includes monitoring getting the product to market. There is
against established criteria and also a tendency for many organizations
advising Management of status to add to or change the scope of their
and issues that would affect the projects mid-stream, to add more and
planned benefits of projects. more functionality or expand the scope
• There is a need to ensure that of ongoing developments. Although
standards are established, well-intentioned, the delays and rework
communicated, and enforced on costs can severely impact the project and
an enterprise-wide basis so that the organization. A CPO is very
project governance can be valuable in these cases by creating a
conducted relative to strategic formal change control policy and leading
goals. a change control board, objectively
• There has been a failure of regulating which changes are made and
management to establish cross- which ones are tabled. I’ve attended
departmental coordination many a panel discussion given by
toward goals for products, venture capitalists and in every single
services, and customers. one of these a VC will state that “they
would rather fund a B idea with an A
However, there must be some middle team than an A idea with a B team.” A
ground in-between having no CPO on the team can help achieve or
governance and having a bureaucratic maintain that A status.
entity suck up overhead dollars while
providing no value. Mature companies must also evaluate
whether they’re suitable or not for a
PMO or simply to have someone on staff
Behold the Chief Project Officer as a CPO. An assessment must be made
on the number of projects conducted by
One of the best things about having a a company within a given year and the
CPO position is its versatility. This is nature of those projects. If so many
something that can and should be projects are being conducted that they
instituted by all organizations for which become a hindrance to each other and it
creates a scenario that’s far too complex
for one person at the organization to
The Chief Project Officer and How One Can Benefit Your Organization 3
© Successful Projects For Leaders. No portion of this document may be copied or distributed without
the expressed written consent of the author.
- 4. properly be debriefed on, ensure that no better; increase their success at hitting
resource conflicts occur, and provide budget estimates; improve quality and
senior-level governance, then satisfaction; and recognize the
establishing a PMO certainly makes substantial financial benefits that come
sense. If not, then it is overkill and the along with that.
CPO makes more sense.
Second, Successful Projects For Leaders
is hired as project turnaround experts
Project Management Offices (PMOs) and is brought in on critical projects that
are in the midst of schedule, budget,
aren’t suitable for every company and
not every company is suitable for a and/or quality issues or projects that are
PMO. A less-expensive, more flexible, having continual setbacks. They analyze
more-agile, and more-suitable solution the problems, set a new budget and
for many organizations is to have a schedule, and work with the incumbent
single person on the Senior Management project management team to bring them
Team, the Chief Project Officer (CPO), to completion.
be responsible for project governance
and to ensure that the right kind of A third benefit that Successful Projects
information is flowing to the rest of that For Leaders offers is their availability to
team. Only the success of its projects be out-sourced by Organizations to serve
can truly guarantee the success of a as the Chief Projects Officer. In this
company. role, Successful Projects For Leaders
only develops standards and practices
directed at the effective execution of
About the Author projects and the attainment of schedule,
cost, scope, and quality objectives, but
Ed Kozak, M.S., M.B.A., PMP is the also communicates enterprise-level
President and CEO of Successful objectives to the respective project
Projects For Leaders, international groups in the most-appropriate way for
experts in project management process them to follow and communicates
improvement. The staff of Successful project information to Management.
Projects For Leaders work with This overcomes the problem common to
companies along three main points of many organizations that no connection
focus. First, they help companies between Operations and project groups
improve their profitability by cutting exists and no structured, consistent, and
wasteful project costs (upwards to 50% meaningful flow of information between
or more) and improve their overall these two groups occurs, allowing
management of projects in order to Management to determine if efforts are
reduce risk, schedule slippage, and efficient and effective, if projects are
unnecessary spending on product still the best ones to support strategic
rework. As a result their clients are able objectives, whether there are
to exert more control over their projects; performance issues associated with
improve target schedule performance; meeting objectives.
monitor and control cost performance
The Chief Project Officer and How One Can Benefit Your Organization 4
© Successful Projects For Leaders. No portion of this document may be copied or distributed without
the expressed written consent of the author.
- 5. Ed is an accomplished professional with
has over twenty-three years experience
as a consultant, manager, executive,
facilitator, and instructor that includes
project/program manager experience in
the private and Government sectors
managing multi-year, multi-million
dollar programs for his clients in fields
such as IT, healthcare, research,
development, and manufacturing. He
brings his expertise to management
teams in strategic planning, process re-
engineering, program management
offices, and project management and is a
frequent conference speaker.
The Chief Project Officer and How One Can Benefit Your Organization 5
© Successful Projects For Leaders. No portion of this document may be copied or distributed without
the expressed written consent of the author.
