A+ Video Game Company

The A+ Video Game Company is a highly successful and competitive technology company that produces interactive video games. The company is successful in developing interactive games, has an excellent reputation for innovative products, and continues to grow their market share.

Senior leadership annually reviews, adjusts, and sets the company's business goals and objectives to keep the company competitive and positioned for future success. To be successful in the marketplace depends heavily on the expertise of the Information Technology (IT) department, the development of proprietary technology to support product offerings, and the ability of the company to introduce new products to market before their competitors.

Each department in the company initiates projects that depend on IT resources for the development of new products to market. The IT department is the most highly sought-after resource in the company. The IT department also has its own initiatives that must be balanced with other company departmental projects. When the other departments engage with the IT department, there is a very long wait period before they get a response to the request for resources to support a project and some projects are prioritized before others by IT without a clear reason as to why. Depending on the department, each has a different method for selecting projects and managing projects to completion. The various methods used are undocumented, inconsistent and provide senior leadership with very little insight into the project work being done. Each project owner does their best to provide status on their progress, but relies heavily on IT for accurate information regarding development progress, which is often difficult to get and is highly subjective in its accuracy. Recently, competitors in the industry have beaten the A+ Video Game Company to market with a new product that has become highly sought after in a short period. In light of future trends in the industry and the efficiencies of the competition in delivering new products to market, the executives of the A+ Video Game Company realize that they need to find a better way to commit to and manage projects to continue being competitive in the industry.

With the company's future depending on their ability to improve and grow competitively in the industry, the executives decided to establish a Project Management Office (PMO) to develop a project management methodology for the management of the company's many projects and resources. The PMO is expected to prioritize the projects and standardize how the company works together to initiate, plan, execute and close projects and to pursue cost-saving initiatives, product development initiatives, and new technology initiatives with speed, flexibility, and efficiency. The key to success is to ensure that the highly demanded IT resources are effectively managed to ensure projects can be delivered with competitive time to market speed. The PMO was created by the President reporting to the manager of IT since the IT department had the most critical resource pool used on the company projects. It was left to the manager of IT to ensure the PMO would be organized properly to improve project success across thecompany. The PMO was staffed with three senior project managers from within the IT organization of the company. The PMO had approximately 60 years of project management experience among the leadership team. To assist this effort, the IT manager hired a consulting firm to work with the PMO staff to organize and establish the project management methods and procedures for use by all project managers across the A+ Video Game Company. From the onset, other department managers did not understand why the IT department was in charge of the PMO and did not outwardly support nor engage in the development of a project management methodology.

With the assistance of the consulting firm, the PMO staff developed a project management methodology for the company to use that addressed how projects would be prioritized, scheduling the project, allocating resources, management of the project, reporting, and decision making. Every project manager in the company attended a two-day training session regarding the new project management methodology and a start date to begin using the methodology was set and communicated by the PMO.

A few months have passed and the PMO identified a concerning trend. The amount of time the PMO was investing in follow-up with project managers to gather the standard information needed for executive leadership reports was increasing. Documentation was not being completed or stored where expected. Updates on the project were late or did not follow the standards set by the PMO. Although the project managers received training on the project management methods, the PMO was struggling with ensuring executives had accurate information about the project work in a timely manner for decision making and planning. Projects were being initiated by the department managers without following the procedures established by the PMO creating more requests for IT resources than the company could realistically provide. The President of A+ Video Game Company was getting increasingly frustrated at the clear lack of progress and blamed the manager of IT and the PMO for the failure to implement something as simple as a project management methodology. If the President couldn't rely on the PMO to do a very basic function, how could he rely on the PMO to improve the company's future success?

1. Do you agree or disagree with the plan laid out to implement the Project Management Office (PMO) and the Project Management Methodology? Explain your position.

2.Are there additional actions you feel that are necessary but were missing from the case? If so, what are those additional actions you would recommend and why?