Show All

Hide All

The objective of this template is to identify and correlate the activities required for the full project life cycle involved in the conceptualization, development, and creation of a project office. The template is designed to focus on the required steps and processes to successfully initiate, monitor, and establish an enterprise project office.

Template design

This template is based on a phased methodology that uses phase-completion milestones as a mechanism for reporting. It can be customized with additional milestones (milestone: A reference point marking a major event in a project and used to monitor the project's progress. Any task with zero duration is automatically displayed as a milestone; you can also mark any other task of any duration as a milestone.) and deliverables as appropriate.

Template organization

The template is organized into six key phases: scope, planning, initiating, management, historical and post-implementation review. Each phase contains associated and their respective dependencies. The activities are generic and may need to be edited to fit your particular environment or methodology.

Scope

The scope phase of a project office project clearly defines the objective for the project. It also clearly identifies project sponsorship and core ownership. A clearly defined scope is imperative to any project office undertaking and often the scope phase actually determines whether a project proceeds or is cancelled based upon its business value.

Planning

After the scope is clearly defined and the project sponsor is identified you can continue with more detailed yet still high-level planning. The objective of this phase is to detail the role, business processes, and need for a project office. In addition, job descriptions and resource needs will be reviewed. It is important to note that the analysis is influenced by the current business goals and direction that in turn may influence the office scope. The conclusion of this phase ensures that those requesting the development and the team clearly understand the scope of the project and have obtained the necessary approvals to proceed to the initiate phase.

Initiate project office

The initiate phase of the project office template focuses on establishing the physical office and collecting and reviewing existing projects along with guidance for any new project initiatives. This process ensures that all projects managed by the project office comply with the standards and initiatives of the organization and guidelines of the project office.

Management

The management phase provides for the ongoing analysis and reporting of projects. The office helps resolve problems, analyze risk, identify and provide resources and other activities and ensures that project status (status report: A description of the status of a member's project work and related work. Status reports are requested, filled out, and reviewed in Project Server and cannot be used to automatically update project information in Project.) is properly reported. The office is also the escalation point for issue resolution.

Historical

The historical phase ensures that the lessons learned from the project are captured and that a knowledge base of project information is created as a baseline  (baseline plan: The original project plans [up to 11 per project] used to track progress on a project. The baseline plan is a snapshot of your schedule at the time that you save the baseline and includes information about tasks, resources, and assignments.) for future projects. The information contained in a historical archive significantly improves processes of creating and managing future projects

Post-implementation review

This phase utilizes the feedback obtained from multiple sources during the project office initiative to effectively measure end user satisfaction and provide for lessons learned. The PIR is significant in that it will ensure future engagements benefit from any lessons learned.