x Contents
7 Implementing the Project Office: Case Study 167
Alfonso Bucero, PMP
8 Keep Moving: Getting Your Arms Around Chaos 197
Colonel Gary LaGassey, USAF
9 In or Out? Staffing and Operating the Project Office 219
PART THREE: MAKING CHANGE STICK 245
10 Looking Forward: Embedding Project Practices
in the Culture of the Organization 249
Dennis Cohen, Strategic Management Group
11 The Tale We Tell 277
Appendix: Templates for Project Office Planning 291
References 299
Index 303
xi
PREFACE
F
aster, cheaper, better. Accidental project manager. In or out? Are you done
yet? We’re in a mess! Why can’t we ? If these challenges sound familiar
within your organization, welcome aboard.
This is a book about improving organizational performance by implementing
a project office system that develops project management as a core competency
and thus adds value to the organization. A project office consists of a team dedi-
cated to improving the practice of project management in the organization. The
improvement in organizational performance is achieved by obtaining more value
from projects, making project management a standard management practice, and
then moving the organization toward the enterprise project management concept.
Enterprise project management is an organization-wide managerial philoso-
phy. It is based on the idea that company goals are achievable through a web of
simultaneous projects supported by a systemic approach that includes corporate
strategy projects, operations improvement, and organizational transformation

embrace the enterprise project management concept. This book reflects the ma-
terial covered during those workshops as well as contributions from a constituency
of consultants and practitioners through lifelong experiences. Contributors to the
book include consultants Graham, Dinsmore, and Cohen, along with practition-
ers Storeygard, Bucero, and LaGassey. Englund plays a dual role, currently a con-
sultant but drawing on many years as a practitioner and in an HP project office.
Many other professionals also graciously shared their learning and worked their
way into the collective knowledge compiled herein.
The design of the book is the result of suggestions from workshop partici-
pants. Other books on the project office acknowledge the importance of the of-
fice in facilitating change in the organization. Despite this acknowledgment,
however, concepts on using a project office as a vehicle for organizational change
are often left to the last chapter, almost an afterthought. Workshop participants
who were currently working on implementing project offices agreed that this em-
phasis, although important, came too late. It is difficult to change the perception
and function of any organizational entity after it has been established. Therefore,
xii Preface
if the ultimate goal is to change the organization, then that should be the focus
from the beginning. That is why we wrote this book.
The emphasis in this book is not on the day-to-day operation of the project
office, although that topic is covered. Rather, the focus is the process of imple-
menting a project office in an organization with the goal of bringing about orga-
nizational change that ultimately adds to the economic value of the organization.
Not every reader plans to go all the way to implement the full Monty—a strate-
gic project office—and some may even get discouraged by the pitfalls we describe.
However, we also include specific skill-building approaches and revised ways to
think about things that offer value to these readers. The implications of power,
operating across organizations, and project portfolio management processes are
examples. These have wider applications than just a project office, but are even
more potent when the PO leads the effort. We draw from a variety of fields and

the problems associated with organizational change processes and gives a step-by-
step guide to the process of using a project office as organizational change vehicle.
Chapter Two gives more detail on the first important step of that process, creat-
ing a sense of urgency for the change and making sure that the result of the change
will ultimately add economic value to the organization. Any change process in-
volves power and politics, so Chapter Three is a program manager’s guide to or-
ganizational politics with an aim toward using that knowledge for creating a
powerful coalition for change. Chapter Four covers many of the details concern-
ing the functions and operations of a project office so that organizational change
agents begin to develop a vision, strategy, and communications plan to let people
know what the office is and what it does. Chapter Five is a case study showing how
many of the concepts covered in the first four chapters were applied at 3M.
Chapter Six begins the second part of the book, covering the problems and
processes of managing change when the project office begins to have first contact
with members of the organization. Chapter Seven is a case study from HP Spain
that shows how the manager of that project office managed its interface with the
rest of the organization. Chapter Eight is another case study, from a U.S. Air Force
Base in Italy, that describes implementing a project office in a very short time,
under rapidly changing conditions, and in a highly bureaucratic organization.
Chapter Nine calls on information from case studies as it covers the important
topics of staffing and operating the project office.
Chapters Ten and Eleven cover the final part of the change process, that of
consolidating the changes to make them an organizational reality. In these chap-
ters we acknowledge that most change processes fail because they only develop
surface changes and leave the basic assumptions of organization members un-
touched. Chapter Ten covers the steps necessary to change basic assumptions of
organization members and thus integrate the new processes into the organiza-
tional culture. Chapter Eleven adds a few more important insights into the process,
and discusses the action-planning templates in the Appendix, whose use will help
make the changes stick.

To all the executives, project managers, and professionals
who contributed directly or indirectly to this work by providing
their experiences to be shared with the reading public.
xvii
THE AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Authors
Randall L. Englund is an independent executive consultant, author, trainer, and
speaker, serving to guide management and project teams through an organic ap-
proach to project management. His background was as a senior project manager
at Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) in the Project Management Initiative, whose
purpose, as a corporate project office, was to lead the continuous improvement of
project management across the company.
During twenty-two years at HP, Englund consulted with product developers
on cross-organizational projects, developed workshops, documented best prac-
tices, and assisted teams to conduct project start-up meetings, implement project
management practices, and prioritize project portfolios. He was a program man-
ager in computer system product development and a major account marketing
engineer. He also worked in field service for General Electric Medical Systems.
He holds a B.S.E.E. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an
M.B.A. in management from San Francisco State University, and an honorary en-
gineering and management degree from Cal Poly State University, San Luis
Obispo, and attended Stanford University’s Mastering the Project Portfolio Pro-
gram. He is certified by the Product Development and Management Association
as a New Product Development Professional and as a Certified Business Manager
by the Association of Professionals in Business Management.
Englund and Graham joined forces, leveraging their practitioner, consult-
ing, and executive education skills, to coauthor the book Creating an Environment
for Successful Projects: The Quest to Manage Project Management. Both are frequent con-
tributors to the Project Management Institute (PMI), as presenters, workshop
facilitators, and authors.

xviii The Authors and Contributors
sional (PMP), writes the “Up & Down the Organization” column for the Project
Management Institute’s PM Network magazine.
Dinsmore has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University, a
postgraduate degree in business administration from Getulio Vargas Foundation
in São Paulo, Brazil, and attended the Advanced Management Program at Har-
vard Business School.
You can reach Paul Dinsmore at
Contributors
Alfonso Bucero, PMP, is now an independent project management consultant
and speaker. He is operations manager of the International Institute for Learn-
ing (IIL) for Spain and Portugal. His background was as a project manager at
Hewlett-Packard Consulting, where he developed and managed the PMO im-
plementation whose purpose was the continuous improvement of project man-
agement discipline across the organization. He assisted in rolling out the PMO
practices to a global project office.
During his thirteen years at HP he managed various customer, infrastructure,
development, and change management projects. He spent the last two years at
HP selling and implementing the project office; his case, presented in this book,
explains the problems he had, the things he learned, and the way he contributed
to organizational change through a PMO implementation. Bucero has a B.S. de-
gree in computer science engineering, and he is a frequent contributor to inter-
national project management conferences and project office workshops.
Dennis J. Cohen is vice president and executive of the Project Management Prac-
tice area for the Strategic Management Group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
works with clients to maximize project performance. He coauthored, with Robert
Graham, the book The Project Manager’s MBA: How to Translate Project Decisions into
Business Results. He served the Wharton School as a research associate, senior fel-
low, and adjunct assistant professor of management, teaching courses in man-
agement and entrepreneurship and leading seminars in executive education