1. How does NPMO help countries to resolve residency, support change management and improve transparency?
2. How effective is NPMO in aligning project delivery with the government strategy?
3. How does NPMO enable alignment strategies in the public sector?
4. How, and to what extent, can PMOs collaborate and assist organisations to achieve organisational strategic goals?
5. How, and to what extent, can PMO teams share knowledge?
6. What is the appropriate governance model to align the country’s SMO with NPMO?
7. How to transform the current framework and mandate of the NPMO as infrastructure based to cover all types of public programmes and projects including the current thirteen Transformation Vision Realization Programs (VRPs) to increase the value of lessons learned and benefits realization?
The result of these will help the NPMO team to assist governmental PMOs to achieve the objectives that the government has mandated to transform project management and establish a NPMO.
Aim
The aim of this study is to provide recommendations on how an governmental organisation’s PMO decides to react to a change initiative and implement it to achieve new objectives and how it reports fully and transparently to the NPMO. It will do this with a study of NPMOs in Saudi Arabia to align with governmental PMOs, as well as lessons learned and improvements seen in efficiency and productivity.
Rationale
It will review of literature on project (or program) management offices (PMOs) and national project (or program) management offices (NPMOs). Further, it presents the challenges of adapting PMOs, and the need to establish PMOs for further research to be conducted to contribute to the concept of PMOs, and to enhance Saudi Vision 2030 to achieve the objectives involved in transforming the culture of project management in the country.
A systematic and rigorous literature review of project management in order to determine the current level of knowledge associated with PMOs and NPMO has been conducted. Based on this review, the definition, history, role, and challenges facing organisations associated with PMOs and Saudi Vision 2030.
Improvements have been reported on the aspects of how programmes are being managed, however projects continuing to face considerable difficulties and failures continue. From evaluation NAO identified the following recurring issues that contributed to poor performance, these are:
• An absence of portfolio management at both departmental and government level.
• Lack of clear, consistent data with which to measure performance.
• Poor early planning.
• Lack of capacity and capability to undertake a growing number of projects.
• A lack of clear accountability for leadership of a project.
• From further examination new challenges have emerged. The turnover of senior responsible owners (SRO) was high with only 4 of the 73 programmes in the Portfolio for 4 years having had the consistency of a single SRO. Shortages of skills in the areas of risk management and behaviour change was concerning especially because of transformation projects increasing in volume (National Audit Office UK, 2016, p.7).
The outcome of this research will be a better understanding of the value of PMO and its processes and the development of a framework which identifies entrenched habits and replaces them with standardised and efficient practices.
Objectives:
• Investigate the current maturity of selected governmental PMOs
• Assess the readiness to align with NPMO practices and standards
• Identify the current challenges to adapt one unified project management framework