Project Office - Development, Support and Control Functions

Project Office

How Project Offices are structured and what they do may vary from organisation to organisation. However, there are three main areas of responsibility; development, support and control.

The development functions are those that involve recruiting, training and developing project managers. The goal is to provide a pool of experienced, talented project managers who are capable of tackling any project and of managing it successfully.

Development Functions

Recruiting project managers from within the organisation

• Hiring project managers from outside the organisation

• Defining a project management training path and ensuring that it is followed

• Providing mentors for novice project managers

• Establishing a mutual assistance programme for project managers

• Conducting project reviews to determine whether a project manager needs help

• Evaluating project managers at the completion of each project and recommending steps for improvement.

The support functions are those that help project managers to do their jobs better, by providing assistance and clarity in project management processes. They include such functions as status reporting, procedures for starting and ending projects, and a process to establish priorities among projects.

Support functions

• Providing an escalation path for project issues

• Developing procedures to help project managers who are also team participants to balance the demands placed on them

• Providing assistance to project managers who are required to manage multiple projects

• Providing a central source of cost- and time-data gathering

• Producing standard reports on the status of projects, e.g. performance against budget or schedule

• Establishing standards for initiating and closing projects

• Providing a mechanism for managing changes to project scope

• Establishing a process to define priorities among projects

• Helping project managers negotiate for the necessary resources

• Implementing project management tools such as applications or methodologies

• Providing a forum for mediation when a project manager and a client dispute aspects of the project

• Providing templates for project management deliverables, such as the project charter or project management plan.

Control functions are line management functions and include evaluating project managers, assigning project managers to projects, ensuring that project management deliverables are produced and are of adequate quality, and establishing and enforcing standards.

Control Functions

• Providing line management for project managers

• Assigning project managers to projects

• Defining mandatory project requirements such as status reports, team meetings or project plans

• Reviewing project management deliverables to ensure that they are produced and to validate their quality.

In short, the development and control functions deal with project managers, whereas the support functions deal with projects, specifically with ensuring that the procedures for successful delivery are being followed.

It must be emphasised that many Project Offices handle only a subset of these functions, with the rest being handled by IT management or by corporate support functions, such as human resources.