Standardize for Success

With so many projects, programs, and portfolios to manage, it’s critical that your project management office (PMO) be streamlined. It’s easy to lose time and resources if your processes change from project to project and you have to handle each one with an , individualized approach. This is exactly how the success rates of your projects will decline.

The best thing that you can do for your PMO is to implement standards. Imagine everyone in your office abiding by the same practices and processes on all projects. Establishing a repeatable process will produce endless benefits for you and your company. Not only will your projects be consistent and easier to manage and measure, but you will also see increased success. Here are just a few reasons why standardization within your PMO is crucial.

Ensuring Project Success

Your number one responsibility as a PMO is to ensure project success. A key way of doing this is creating a standard process for all projects to follow. This process is developed from experience, best practices, and lessons learned from the organization. Providing that standardized process for each project to follow is the best way a PMO can ensure project success.

Saving Time

Standardizing saves time, pure and simple. It saves time for the PMO as you don’t have to deal with every project as a one-off. You’re not running around talking to every project manager about every project and attempting to understand their process, reporting, and results. You’re all on the same page. It also saves significant time for the PMs, as they can get started much more quickly with a standard process, templates, documents, etc.

Improving Tracking and Monitoring

An important part of the project management process is tracking and monitoring. As your organization’s PMO, it’s up to you to give your project managers the tools and processes to know how your projects, programs, and portfolios are progressing. Are they moving forward on schedule? Do you need to invest more resources so they can succeed? While this is a core part of your responsibilities, it shouldn’t have to take up the majority of your time. Implementing governance within your office will help with time management, both for you and the project managers. Tracking and managing your projects through standardized means will reduce the burden of managing “one offs” , giving you more time to invest in developing successful portfolios.

Increasing Accuracy of Reports

Preparing project, program and portfolio reports also creates a huge drain on everyone’s valuable time. You have so many better things to do than pull data, crunch numbers, and format PowerPoint slides. By the time you’ve spent hours and days compiling a report, your data might not even be accurate anymore. Standardization ensures everyone is capturing and reporting the same data and information, which helps ensures a more efficient review process for all involved—those preparing the reports and those reviewing and assessing the projects.

Building Future Success

Standardization isn’t just going to help you in the short term. Sure it helps with each project and is a contributor to project success, but the long term benefits will increase your productivity and bolster your achievements, as well. A big part of this is creating best practices. As you implement a standard practice, you will learn from it. You will figure out what works best and what can be left behind. As you learn, you will refine your process to guarantee future success.

Standardization may sound like a daunting task. How do you even begin? We’re here to help you. CorasManage establishes a unified system for your office that will support you to success. We can pull live, up-to-the-minute data from all your different systems to help you track, monitor and report on your projects, programs and portfolios. With a standardized system, you can stop sweating the small stuff and focus on building towards your bright future.