Techies leading deployments a recipe for disaster: project management boss

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 13 June 2008 09:34

IT Industry - Market

Yet the surveys found that even where PMOs exist, only 60 percent of them feed into an organisation-wide portfolio management framework, and 80 percent have little authority to make project related decisions.

"I was a little surprised" about the small proportion of organisations with PMOs, said Belcher, but he was reassured by the finding that 81 percent of those that do say it delivers tangible business benefits.

He recommends providing existing subject matter experts with formal project management training, and then using them along with consulting services (such as those offered by PMPartners) to build a PMO and an appropriate implementation methodology.

"That way a relatively small number of people can achieve a lot using the resources organisations already have," he said.

But "organisations have varying levels of maturity in project management" and an alternative approach is to outsource the project management function, but Belcher suggests the people involved should be brought into the organisation as if they were employees.

PMPartners Group was formed by the merger of project management training and consulting firm PMPartners with IT project delivery organisation ITPM.

At first glance, it may seem slightly odd that the enlarged firm chose someone who previously held director-level positions at data communications, networking and data storage businesses as its CEO.

But "it really isn't," says Belcher.

His earlier executive positions include managing director of Datacraft Australia and managing director at StorageTek in Australia and New Zealand. "A large part of what we did was delivery," he said.

"It's good to have leading edge technology, but it's what you do with it that's important."