The Project Management Office (PMO): Its role and contribution to governance and strategy in organizations

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Date
2013-05
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Publisher
The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
Alongside the move by organizations towards utilizing project management techniques for managing their operations, the PMO has recently become a key business unit in organizations that can impact positively on organizational performance. With the aim of assessing the role of the PMO as a key driver for governance and strategy; this dissertation has been developed to cover many advanced project management related subjects; PMO, corporate governance, project governance, and strategy. The role of the PMO varies from organization to another, as it might have a very strategic role for the organization by managing and directing the overall organization business and operations, and might have a very limited supportive role in some divisions, and this variation is due to nature of business, type of organization structure, and the PMO location within the organization. A methodology of three stages have been deployed; started with determining the strategic and governing roles of the PMO, defining the factors that affect the PMO roles and contribution, and selecting five organizations from UAE business environment as case studies for this research. The resulted outcome from this research has shown that the PMOs roles and contribution to the corporate governance and organization strategy increases with increasing the PMO maturity and moving towards projected team structures, and the PMOs roles decrease at low mature PMO and functional organizations. Within UAE, the role of the PMOs showed variation between organizations even those having same type of structures; however the results have shown that the contribution of the PMOs is ranging between medium to high even in projected team and matrix structure organizations. There are other factors affecting the role of the PMO i.e. percentage of projects to overall operations, nature of industry, and location of the PMO in the organization. Several recommendations can be made out of this research for PMOs professionals to put more efforts on some roles and areas as this will be reflected on PMOs maturity and the value for the organizations especially the strategic and the governing role.
Description
DISSERTATION WITH DISTINCTION
Keywords
Project Management Office (PMO), corporate governance, project governance, corporate strategy, organization structure, PMO maturity
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