PMO Organization Model

This case study talks about AtekPC, mid-sized PC building company founded in 1984. The company had a rapid growth during 1990's with a highest achievable sale of $1.9 billion in 2006, but after that year things were not going that well and company has found itself struggling against the competition. Organization had a 2100 full time employees and 200 part time employees at different positions in the company, all of them were part of a big family that has had one mission and that is a production of full-pledged PC's. In the past, IT projects were usually handled by the current team members, which were responsible for the execution of all project management responsibilities, this means that there was no PMO office present back then. But the

Both represent two completely different styles of PMO organizational approaches. At on side we have PMO heavy which is characterized by a full staff of project managers who have complete control and responsibility for management of all IT projects. This model allows us to hire project management experts, either from internal or external sources, and use them to manage resources and projects under the control of the PMO. In extreme case of PMO heavy model, none of the projects can operate outside the management and control of the PMO. Mark Nelson favored this model type as the best one for the company, but he was aware of the fact that people won’t support him immediately for this approach. He said, “I dont think there's enough education about project management to know the difference between PMO light and PMO heavy. One of the main drawbacks of this approach is the lack of human resources in order to implement this approach. Company wanted to move fast to be competitive, but they simply did not have enough people to do so. Also people or the culture in the company was close minded or ignorant and they didn’t wanted to move to this approach. Many people in the company viewed the PMO and the project management overall as a pure formality or something that stands in the way of doing "real work" such as programming, networking, manufacturing, assembling and other stuff. Second approach, called PMO light was more focused on a small group of people who were not formally connected with the PMO. Nelson preferred this model at the beginning. He said, "If I had no constraints I would like to be able to bring on the team of people consisting of project analysts, as well as managers, very quickly. Bring in a group of people up front. Most of them could be new to get started. Then as you go on, you could pull in from the rest of the organization. They would all be part of the PMO. So we