Reflection on “Standards of Care by Gantz, December 2014”

The article “Standards of Care” discussed the PMO implementation experience for one of the firms in the healthcare industry; it represented a success story for an organization called WellPoint. The article discussed their project management philosophy, which allowed them to be in market ahead of their competitors and to develop solutions to meet the needs of their customers, no matter what the diverse and challenges were.

The market place that we have nowadays is very competitive, and the business environment is very complex, and that makes the need of the PMO big. Basically what the PMO did to WellPoint is that it kept the company flexible and responsive to each project’s needs. Additionally, it shifted the organization’s project management culture, knowing that the focus was on avoiding getting stuck on forms, methodology, and rigidity to encourage people to work with them, without losing focus on the top strategic initiatives of course. The final result was having a technically successful system that is also extremely customer-focused.

Through the implementation process, the firm was also learning a lot from that experience; they slowly progressed with the firm, teaching staff the value of project organization, and that caused a cultural shift of project management in the firm, which was as crucial as the principles of project management itself.

Some of the learned lessons of this article is that PMO has strengths the firms’ project culture and drive fast strategic growth. Additionally, I found that it is very important to integrate the project culture within the corporate culture, because the best practices alone will not make the project successful, because culture is what creates, feeds, and supports passion.

After reading this article, I was shocked by the fact that I have never seen an official PMO, in any of the projects that I worked on; knowing that I have been part of many projects in the construction industry, and some of these projects’ cost exceeded 450 million dollars! If that means something, it means that maturity level in project management varies a lot from one place to another. I also believe that many companies are functioning without a clear vision or mission, and that is the main issue, that is why they don’t have a clear management philosophy, and if you don’t have that, it will be almost impossible to support the implementation of the PMO.