Refocus your PMO - part III

1. Critical Importance of Project Health Checks and Audits
The recession has increased the need for project audits more than ever. As organizations continue to look for immediate ways in which to save money and time, a project audit becomes a significant strategy for a PMO to quickly get to the source of project delays and other problems. Project audits always creates future opportunities and savings by helping to identify the root cause of problems and getting badly projects back on track. They have a direct, bottom-line impact for both public and private organizations.

Organizations that are considering employee lay-offs need to make sure that the projects in their pipeline are implemented on time and on budget despite staff reductions. A Project Health Check or Project Audit ensures that these projects are kept on track because any potential problems are quickly identified. Organizations that are scrambling to get new products to market want to accelerate their new product development life cycle and here too, project audits can be their saviour because they can quickly identify ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of projects.

If your organization is facing any of these challenges below, Project Audits are required• Projects are not aligned with the strategic imperatives and are therefore wasting resources, time and budget.
•Organizations are not seeing a positive impact on their bottom-line and/or customers from projects.
•Projects are over-time, over-schedule and/or under-resourced.
•Innovations are failing owing to the poor management of projects.
•There are many projects of various sizes within the organization and each department but it is unclear how each one aligns with overall corporate strategy. This leads to resource over-allocation on non-priority projects.
•Resources are stretched and not sure where to spend their time.
•The organization is clear on the expected outcomes from Strategic Initiatives but aren’t sure which ones will help them reach these.
•There is no strategic vision for the management of projects, though the organization may have an overall corporate strategic vision.
•There is no culture which supports the consistent management of all projects.
•Projects are in crisis and there is lots of fire-fighting.
•There is blame and excuses for poor project management.