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I am starting a project of going through the 6th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide and blogging about its contents.    The 6th Edition was released on September 22nd by the Project Management Institute, and the second chapter is a general introduction to the framework in which project management exists.

There are many types of entities which can influence a project:

• Risks–events which can influence a project (covered by Risk Management)
• Shareholders–people who can influence a project (covered by Shareholder Management)
• Environmental Enterprise Factors (EEFs)–conditions not under control of the project team that can be either internal and/or external to the organization
• Organizational Process Assets (OPAs)–company policies and/or knowledge bases accumulated from previous projects
• Organizational Structure–whether a company chooses a functional vs. project-oriented structure or something in between, whether a company chooses a project which is simple, multi-divisional, or virtual, or finally whether a company chooses a traditional, agile or hybrid project management framework.

Today’s post is the final section of this second chapter, and it covers the project management office, an organizational structure that standardizes project management throughout the organization.    There are three types of project management office or PMO.

A supportive PMO acts in a consultative role and supplies templates, training, and lessons learned from other projects to project managers.

A controlling PMO does the above but also requires compliance to the templates supplied by the PMO to the project managers.    This is the function of quality assurance applied to projects.

A directive PMO does the above but also takes control over not just the processes, but the results of the project.   This is the function of quality control applied to projects.

This past chapter focuses on the environment in which projects exist.   The third and next chapter focuses on the project manager, and that will be the topic of the next series of posts.

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