Projects, programs and PMO's

As a humble IT staffer and amateur project manager (I openly admit that all my skills are by the seat of my pants), Enterprise Project Management (or Program Management these days) is a dirty word. We have a brand-spanking new Project Management Office (PMO, put it in your glossary) and so far it's been nothing but a headache for the rank and file. I've worked in organizations with PMO's before and my general experience is that it creates an ivory tower of project managers (PM's) that only work on "important" (read high profile) projects. Our new PMO has both PM's and Business Analysts(BA's) taken from ITS, all under a new assistant director (don't get me started on manager to associate ratios) who was a consultant advising us on project management lifecycles (another dirty word).

The first thing that happened upon the formation of the PMO was that the PM that specialized in the business area that I support came to me and bailed on my project. A major vendor has been upgrading our LoB app from mainframe green screens to a nice web app, we've gotten two major modules in two years and are gearing up for number three. Each release requires quality assurance testing, user acceptance testing and general project management of communication and issues. The new assistant director decided that this project was undeserving of a PM and that I could run it fine on my own. Never mind that I'm already at task overload with other projects and my normal duties, I needed one more thing to get me to jump off the parking garage.

The icing on the cake was in a staff meeting we lowly IT pions (we work directly with the business, so therefore we're pariahs) would have to strengthen our business analysis skills because the BA's of the PMO (alphabet soup, anyone?) were too busy. I don't mind new skills, unfortunately I'm already learning a whole new business application that was dumped on my plate and trying to bring it from the brink of neglect to the point where the server does require a daily restart.

Needless to say, I'm in love with the whole Enterprise Project Management concept, since it looks great on paper and centralizes resources as far away from where they're needed as possible. I personally believe that IBM, HP and all the other IT consulting heavyweights have a conference each year and come up with the "next big thing". Be it ITIL, SOA, or Web 2.0, I think it's all a conspiracy to drive the IT rank and file insane so we can be more easily offshored. Personally I believe in ITIL, I just haven't seen anyone implement it any further than lip service and mountains of procedures that are ignored.

Program management is a whole other post.