Interviews and Studies in the Project Office

Conduct Interviews

The PMO initiator prepares a questionnaire and then interviews key executives and experienced project managers, preferably in person. The questionnaire acts as a guideline, but each interview is open-ended, and the goal is to define any significant problem that causes projects to fail to deliver acceptable results, or to exceed their schedules or budgets. In addition, the interviews may explore whether projects that should be launched, in fact never start. They may also explore whether any unnecessary projects are launched. The interviewer then organizes, reviews, and confirms all this information to prepare a draft problems list.

Perform Studies

Within this next step, a suite of studies are undertaken to identify potential project management problems within the organization. Note: often, people believe that they fully appreciate the depth of a problem, but further research is usually required to identify the nature of the problem and confirm that it is valid. The following types of studies may be performed to identify current project management problems occurring within the organization:

• Review of outcomes of completed projects
• Review of project lessons learned, if available
• Financial analysis of project cost overruns
• Statistical analysis of project schedule slippage
• Surveys of project managers, teams, and stakeholders

The results of these studies are used to prepare the final problems list.