The contribution of the project management office to organisational performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to summarise a doctoral thesis that has been defended in 2007 and to share scientific results on a recent organisational phenomenon, the Project Management Office (PMO), in a context where most of the literature is currently coming from consultants. The focus of this research bears on the PMO transformation process rather than on the description of their great variety. Results bring into question some established paradigms on PMOs. Design/methodology/approach The methodological strategy is based upon a constructivist epistemology. Just as organisations are complex social entities, so too are the specific organisational project management structures that encompass PMOs. The methodological strategy is designed to understand such complexity. Results reported in the thesis are based upon a grounded theory approach where over 60 interviews from four large organisations were analysed to uncover the process of transformation of organisational project management. Findings There are two primary findings. First, a PMO should not be considered as an isolated island in the organisation, but rather as one part of an archipelago, defined as the organisational project management. Second, the organisation project management and specifically the PMO evolve continuously adapting to changes in their external or internal environment or as an answer to internal tensions. Originality/value From an academic perspective, the originality of this research rests primarily on its non‐positivist epistemology to the study of PMOs and particularly with the mobilisation of a social conceptual framework. From the professional perspective, it provides PMO managers with a fresh look at their own configuration and it gives them means to understand their evolution through their particular history. Being able to do this reflection, managers making decisions on structural dimensions are more critical of the advices from outsiders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".