PMO Quality is the ability of a program management office to meet and exceed performance expectations. PMO quality consists of quality standards, performance tracking, variance analysis, and changes to drive performance improvements. Quality is applied at every PMO level including individual, projects, portfolios, the PMO itself, and the role of the PMO in the enterprise. It is also applied to all services potentially provided by a PMO such as resource management, estimating, governance, contract management, and procurement.
PMO quality standards begin with a documented quality plan that includes procedures, practices, and templates. The plan should also include compliance with contractual requirements, quality management roles and responsibilities, rules for applying a project management methodology, practices for assigning Project Managers based on project risk and complexity, project reviews, certifications, and PMO success criteria. The quality management plan details performance standards, operating procedures, roles and responsibilities, and integration with other major components of project delivery excellence including cost, schedule, scope, and product functionality.
The strength of a PMO quality program lies in its ability to establish quality assurance by collecting data, and tracking performance. At the project level, tracking performance means to track project status in terms of percent complete, dashboard health, cost, schedule, work effort, and other metrics deemed meaningful by Project Managers and sponsors. It is also important to track not just project, but also product quality. Product quality refers to the functionality of the final deliverable, and responsiveness of the delivered product to requirements. It includes a review of business objectives, requirements, functional and technical design, business owner validation of a project plan, business owner engagement in design reviews, development of test scripts, integration and user acceptance testing, training, and documentation in a requirements traceability matrix.
PMO quality can be operationalized by establishing quality checkpoints in a lifecycle methodology. Checkpoints can include consolidated project planning sessions, preparing baseline plans, populating a document repository, preparing functional and technical design requirements, customer reviews and acceptance of plans and requirements, risk assessments, having and using a change management process, and implementing a thorough communications plan. A second key element to quality is establishing and reporting performance metrics. At the project-level, metrics may include cost and schedule control systems criteria such as a cost performance index, schedule performance index, cost and schedule variance, variance at-completion, and earned value. At the PMO-level performance metrics might include total project throughput, resource utilization, planned vs. actual starts, average time from initial request to actual start, on-time completions, variance from baseline budget, and progress on capability maturity. Lifecycle methodologies help ensure that projects are planned and executed logically. A methodology compliance process can help ensure that all the steps are understood, documented, trained, communicated, and applied. It is important to measure compliance with each methodology step or to document agreed deviations. During implementation, it is crucial to establish data quality by measuring approved as-planned dates, documented actual dates, supportable costs, and reliable work effort data. Schedule quality, in a moderate environment, can be defined as timeframe information presented in Gantt chart form where a schedule has been base-lined, resource loaded, includes all logic dependencies, and is effort based. Implementation quality can be capped by developing and managing a go-live readiness checklist to help ensure that products are initiated with minimal risk. Quality includes independent, objective project reviews, and external audits of project process compliance. A post-project review that documents completion metrics, benefits realization, and lessons-learned can serve as an important knowledge management tool to improve quality over time. PMO quality requires that customer satisfaction is tracked, and that any issues are remediated.
Developing data enables a PMO to establish quality by comparing actual performance to standard or expected performance. Then variance analysis paves the way for identifying improvement opportunities, trends, and for reporting on quality initiatives. In a quality process model, be sure to identify and implement process improvement opportunities in the areas of workflow improvements, expense reduction ideas, and process efficiencies that may help support business goals.