OIT Project Management Office

Mission

The Project Management Office (PMO) defines and maintains standards for project management within OIT and assists with Business Analysis, Fit/Gap analysis, and Requirements analysis. The PMO strives to standardize and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of projects. The PMO is the source of documentation, guidance and metrics on OIT's practice of project management and execution. The PMO enables OIT by working to improve the maturity and effectiveness of the project leaders in the organization. It also actively engages in facilitating and running selected projects from start to finish.

Charter

The PMO is a service group within OIT. Basic project management and business analysis services are provided to teams that need this function. Typically projects that are candidates for the PMO include:

1. Projects that cross multiple divisions or teams within OIT where significant coordination of effort is needed.  
2. Projects that cross campus client departments or involve the entire campus or UCI Medical Center. 
3. A project that has no sponsoring group within OIT or is an orphan project.
4. Urgent or high profile projects that are assigned to teams that are short on PM or business analysis resources or skill sets.   
5. A VIP mandate or highly urgent project that is out of scope for any OIT team.

Broad areas where the PMO may be positioned to assist include:

• Project-specific: Overseeing the success of a particular project.
• Departmental: Supporting a specific business unit or division by coordinating multiple projects within a unit, establishing priorities, managing project resources and related costs and maintaining a consistent project delivery schedule.  A departmental PMO would work with senior management to determine overall priorities, then establish a clear criteria that dictates how each project should be handled. As new requests for IT services come in, the PMO would evaluate these requests against this criteria to develop a realistic forecast on how and when a project will be completed according to its priority level.  The PMO would then oversee the execution of these projects to ensure they’re on time and fall within budget and scope. For example, if a client asked to add or change certain features in a software system being developed, the PMO would collect and provide data to explain how this change in scope will affect the project in terms of cost and schedule, setting realistic expectations for when it can be completed.
• Center of Excellence: Providing project managers with ongoing organization-wide training, process improvement, methodology, and tools.  Overseeing the OIT Unified SDLC and its implementation.  Overseeing implementation of the PM standards and framework in ServiceNow or other tools adopted within OIT. Review available project and SDLC frameworks to determine which is the best fit for a particular project profile or scope.