Topic-LES group

Topic-LES group

Topic-LES group

Introduction

The observation has been made that organisations are facing a new context characterized by increased competition, increased rates of product, service and process innovation and an increasing emphasis on time to market. Organisations have responded to these challenges by developing new, more flexible organisational form in which projects are both more numerous and more strategically important. As part of the LES group response to these new challenges and as part of the movement to increase both the number and the strategic importance of projects many organisations have implemented a new organisational entity the most common name for which is the project management office or PMO. The PMO has been addressed extensively in the professional literature. However, there has been very little theoretical or empirical research on the topic. In addition, this organisational innovation has not been examined extensively within the literature stream described above.

Research on PMOs

A recent survey-based on the synchronic description of a large number of PMOs and their organisational contexts has shown extreme variety in both the form and function of PMOs. Attempts to date to reduce this variety to a limited number of models have failed. In addition, the research showed that in the majority of cases PMOs are unstable structures, organisations often reconfigure their PMOs every few years. This instability can be interpreted as both an illustration of structuring as an ongoing LES group process and as an illustration of organisational experimentation as organisations search for an adequate structural arrangement. Half of the respondents to the survey report that the legitimacy of their PMO in its present form is being questioned. This is consistent with both the interpretation in terms of experimentation and a search for best practices and with the interpretation as an instance of the inherent instability of an ongoing process of structuring.

In the survey-based research cited above, correlation analysis found no systematic relationships between the external context in terms of economic sector or geographic region or internal organisational context, on the one hand, and the structural characteristics of PMOs on the other.

None of the classic contingency factors from organisational theory correlated strongly with the form or function of the PMOs. A positivist, synchronic approach has provided a rich description of the great variety found in the population but has failed, so far, to provide an adequate understanding of PMOs. The present paper reports the result of an effort to come to a better understanding of PMOs as an organisational innovation based on the in-depth investigation of eleven cases.

Implementing or reconfiguring LES group PMO

Implementing a LES Group PMO or reconfiguring an existing PMO is an important organisational change. This change is often part of a wider organisational reconfiguration. A methodology and an interpretive framework is needed that can capture the dynamic complexity of organisational change. The approach that has been adopted investigates the PMO embedded in its organisational context. The approach can be related to a long tradition of contextual studies in the literature on project organisations from Midler ...