Atekpc Case Write Up Essay

Business has changed greatly in the last 20-30 years. The introduction of global competition has forced businesses to find new ways to gain a competitive advantage, whether it be new or improved products (as product life cycles have shortened), cost reductions (perhaps through a new MIS), or just improving the customer experience. With Project Management, companies have the ability to focus on many things at once without losing focus on their core business model. By bringing together varied peoples into the PM team, innovation is increased. Under the old way of doing things, the quality of each plan would suffer. Projects have a start and finish and can be tracked and quantified from beginning to end. This ensures a higher quality end result within time and resource restrictions.

Successful organizations are always looking for ways to improve process and procedures, increase revenues and profits, while staying relevant in today’s business world. Strong leadership is the backbone of any organization and is the catalyst for driving a culture of innovation and change. Organizations looking to make small or large-scale changes typically do so through the implementation of work projects. Projects are collaborative efforts carefully planned and designed to achieve a specific goal. According to Young (2010), “projects take careful planning, and a successful project is one that is done on time and within budget” (p.344). Project management is the activity of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources, while monitoring procedures and timelines, and usually has an assigned project manager (PM). Organizations such as Apple are known to have many projects in motion at any given time. This many projects happening simultaneously can be extremely complex, expensive, and taxing on resources, but somehow Apple has managed to implement project after project with huge success.

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A PMO is a unified organization dedicated to improving the application and outcome of project management. They involve huge infrastructure, with rigid rationalized planning, control and procedure. A PMO is an organizational existence created to ease project managers in achieving project design. It is a group of people with a focus to support project managers in the successful implementation, and realization of projects. This provides an opportunity for project managers to broaden professionally if they were working solitarily from one another.

Identify the main purpose and mission of a PMO and what are the main challenges and obstacles in implementing a PMO? (HBS: The AtekPC Project Management Office)

Utilizing the framework will get everyone one the same page, helping the new PMO staff to learn from the experience of employees from other departments who were fulfilling the roles previously. Additionally, the framework will allow for growth of the new staff, in order to consolidate, no longer needing to rely on departments that will not be operating in this capacity in the future.

“Human resources (HR) issues commonly experienced by employers today include diversity, productivity, training, benefits and outsourcing. How each business deals with its specific human resources issues depends on the HR manager or director as well as company policy”(wiseGEEK, n.d.). Utiliscan is currently facing challenges similar to those of other companies. Some of their challenges include hiring, compensation, advancement opportunities, training, benefits, and retaining people. There is also a struggle with developing a program that would improve employee’s performance and level of engagement. To try to get a better handle on how to address the challenges, Utiliscan

Limitations: o Shortage of PMO expert resources; o Staff consisted of: PMO director + 3 contract project managers. Project charter introduced “idea form” = used to prioritize projects. PMO responsibilities: o Establish, publish, and disseminate project practices, standards and tools; o Add Later – Portfolio Management & Archiving of projects for knowledge sharing.

The role of the project management office (PMO) has increased nowadays, as many organizations are implementing it. According to PMI (PMI 2011), organizations with a PMO report more projects coming in on time, on budget and meeting intended goals to those without a PMO.

o Review a case study of an organization applying the PM process groups to manage an IT project. o Understand the contribution that effective project initiation, project planning, project execution, project monitoring and controlling, and project closing make to project success.

Project Management Office (PMO) and Agile method are highly reputable terms in many organizations, especially in their IT projects. The PMO is a group of people or committee within an organization that is responsible to define and maintain standards and practices for traditional project management. The ultimate objective for the PMO is to gain the benefits that are derived from applying Project Management (PM) methods, practices and policies. Thus, the PMO over time will become the origin for documentation, guidance and metrics regarding to any practices that are involved in managing projects within the organization, as well as it will be the communication channel that

Structure: Each organization creates its own PMO. A project management office, abbreviated to PMO, is a group or department within a business, agency or enterprise that defines and maintains standards for project management within the organization. The PMO strives to standardize and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of projects. Also steering committee is created to represent interests of different stakeholders.

• Past evidence to manage big projects:- In year 2000, conversion of order management AtekPC used project management approach. They got everyone together and got it done smoothly. Everyone appreciated it and said it was done well.

Interest in project management has grown considerably over the last few decades, within academics and practitioners, identically, demonstrating an enthusiasm in this field. The approach toward project-oriented organizational design is becoming more common nowadays, with even the most operation-based organizations preferring to define projects to better plan, execute,

How much is management to blame for ATEC’s problems ? Bad management; Bad business; or Bad capital structure ?