The Project Delivery Office – PDO
The Project Delivery Office (PDO) is a system to leverage tools and business processes to improve the collection of project delivery data across the organization. The primary focus of PDO is data capture and data analysis.
PDO focuses on one question “How many projects is your organization managing?”
Accurate data capture and analysis combined with the PDO process will increase the number of successful project delivered on-time and under budget.
By focusing on deliverables, the PDO create a clear separation between the tasks underlying the completion of projects and the project deliverables themselves. Although it is the project managers job to identify the deliverables with stakeholders, it is the PDO’s job to monitor and maintain quality in the entire delivery process.
Maintaining this focus allows the PDO to stay “out of the weeds” and allow project managers to do their job, unencumbered. Also, the PDO remains separate from the efforts of the Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO defines the project management processes and maintains standards for the organization. The PDO supports that effort and works in conjunction with the PMO to improve the completion of deliverables.
PDO manages the agreed upon deliverables from the WBS. PDO allows the other task management processes like Kanban, Agile, etc. to manage their own tasks within their own process.
“The PDO is concerned with deliverables rigor at the appropriate level.”
PDO avoids task management because it is too volatile as each resource, team and organization approaches task management differently. The PDO applies rigor at the right level and allow for agility and flexibility where it is needed most; at the team task level.
For example, some teams interweave operational efforts, support calls, administration time into a resources daily task management effort. PDO focuses on project and project deliverables and, more importantly, the dates agreed upon with the project stakeholders.
PDO manages the changes and deltas between the deliverables estimated dates and actual finish dates of the deliverables. It could take 1 task or 100 tasks to create the deliverables. PDO manager’s primary focus on commitment dates and variances to due dates.