Challenges

It is possible that an Industry PMO will be less accepted and less productive than strengthening and supporting the existing stakeholder meetings, combined with stronger and better communication methods between the groups.

The Industry PMO will only with difficulty be able to carry out the normal functions of control, intervention and decision-making on industry projects. Reporting and Project support will be more straightforward. The focus should only be on reporting specific information which enables the Programme board to take particular decisions, and on tracking the implementation of those decisions.

None of the PMO artefacts or proposed products will have an official standing within the other organisations. Consensus and collaboration is the only allowed way forward at the moment (rather than enforcement). The language of Project Management and Controls works better in an enforcement context, and so the current initiative needs to work steadily so that the progress made to date is not undone. Moving forward without a clear national System Design Authority

Suggestions:

Reach back into broader organisation to make as much use of Investment Project’s PMO and community of practice as possible. Ensure that projects are appropriately allocated the right internal clients and sponsors. Prioritise the creation of decision rights and accountability matrix. This will however be political and subject to much consultation with the parent companies and entities. Focus on one or two key areas like this will be time intensive but will be likely to support future progress disproportionately. This could be encoded or placed in some form of non-binding contract, perhaps in terms of an Alliance. Retain as much of the current meeting structure as possible. The meetings appear to have grown organically over the last 15 years to cover the appropriate topics and stakeholders. Rationalising existing meetings is likely to be counterproductive. The existence of any current Programme Board and Steering group is a great strength, and every effort should be made to maintain and reinforce the decisions made at those levels. Care should be taken not to take any powers away from these existing committees without widespread support and the present means to deliver powers via the PMO. Existing meetings should be encouraged to maintain their own issues and risk registers. Templates can be provided for that purpose. Undue centralisation is likely to cause the PMO to become a bottleneck, and create the unrealistic expectation that the PMO will By focussing first on the internal PMO activities, and then on external PMO activities, so that change is measured and progressive. Due attention will need to be made to the long-term supplier position, without which nothing can be sustained. Their needs should be given equal priority within the programme scope, ensuring that approval processes and commissioning schedules are prepared for them on time, and subject to stringent change control Setting up risk, issue and change control will need to be carefully prepared in concert with the current scope documentation, system definitions, reference architecture, and in consultation with the engineers so that risks, issues and scope can be allocated clearly to the right functional area.

Typical Assumptions:

There is already a Programme plan, or set of plans, and the task is to bring it under control rather than to create a new DR plan MSP4NR and GRIP already mandates many processes, and these will be adopted and enforced by the inward facing PMO A plan to address the backlog needs to be carefully considered, and is likely to be expensive.