Project Management Business Fundamentals Report - Construction

This report delves into project management fundamentals, examining the business lifecycle and the pivotal role of a Project Management Office (PMO). Part A discusses essential business basics, including strategic management, accounting, and operational skills, highlighting the importance of these skills in a project's success. Part B focuses on the PMO's function, particularly within a construction organization, emphasizing governance, expert support, performance management, and supplier management. The report details key PMO responsibilities such as schedule development, quality management, communications management, governance, and project control. It underscores the PMO's critical role in providing technical advice, ensuring project milestones are met, maintaining quality standards, facilitating effective communication, and supporting informed decision-making. The report also addresses supplier management and project control, ensuring projects are delivered on time and within budget. The PMO is responsible for collecting project data, performing earned value calculations, and providing reports to the project manager for necessary actions. The report references key project management texts to support its findings.

Running head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT BUSINESS FUNDAMENTALS 1
Project Management: Business Fundamentals
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

PROJECT MANAGEMENT BUSINESS FUNDAMENTALS 2
Part A
What I have learned from the business basics and life cycle is that it is a progression of a
business and its different phases such as production, sales among others over time. Indeed,
business basics provides offer essential skills such as strategic management, basic accounting,
financial management, management of sales, people and operation management. These skills can
be acquired in several ways such as hiring employees with strong skills in these areas,
involvement in professional business advisory and undergoing training to gain these skills.
Part B
A project management office (PMO) is a special department within an organization that is tasked
with upholding the standards of project management. The role of PMO in organizations is
different depending on the business type as well as the projects needs to be executed. In this
regard, this paper will discuss the role of PMO in a construction organization in general. The key
roles of PMO include providing governance and expert support, performance management, and
supplier management among other responsibilities.
In construction, individuals who are from related technical fields drive the project. Thus,
giving technical advice and governance regarding project management essential is a critical
responsibility of a PMO (Nicholas & Steyn, 2017). The advice include schedule development,
quality management, communications management and governance.
Schedule development: The functions of schedule management is to help the program in
identifying project level milestones and interconnection them to the whole program level design.
The project level design is a summary view of the key project milestones (Kerzner, 2017).
Therefore PMO leverage tools such as Microsoft Project Server to integrate the project schedule

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details into a detailed project schedule. In this sense, the PMO vigilantes the schedule variance
and provide correction action.
Quality management: The project management office offers quality management by giving
expertise in quality assurance, quality control, process coaching and harmonizing quality
evaluations. Although this role is considered an administrative overhead and intrusive to specific
projects, it is a fundamental operation for reliable delivery (Kerzner, 2017). Consequently, the
PMO evaluate the project level deliverables by providing coaching to project teams that need
extra project management support.
Communications management: Indeed, each project needs effective communication plan. For
that reason, the PMO creates a general standard communication program that should be followed
by the project. In addition, the PMO aids the project manager in developing essential
communications to the project stakeholders.
Governance: The PMO governance responsibility plays a crucial role by offering decision
support for stakeholders, decision makers as well as project sponsors included in the project.
Through documenting governance decisions and trailing action items for forthcoming
governance sessions provides the management the necessary support for effective decision-
making.
Supplier management: The PMO provide support to the supplier management by observing
different suppliers offering services to the project and notifying the project director of issues
related to supplier performance (Kerzner, 2017). In this regard, supplier performance scorecards
are incorporated into the PMO and distinct suppliers work to comprehend the performance
reporting standards.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT BUSINESS FUNDAMENTALS 4
Project control: Project control work to see to it that the project is delivered on time and within
the schedule. Nonetheless, the project is not restricted to only time and schedule. While these are
the most critical variable for any project, a project will have other secondary stakeholders, which
need to be achieved and organizational policies that should be followed among others aspects
that will benefit from a strong project control (Nicholas & Steyn, 2017). The PMO has the power
to implement project control and provide advice to specific project ladders. Therefore, the PMO
is tasked with collecting project data from the project teams such as the percentage of work
completed by each task and performing earned value calculations. After that PMO hands over
reports about schedule, applicable ahead and behind budget to the project manager for necessary
action to be undertaken.

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References
Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and
controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Nicholas, J. M., & Steyn, H. (2017). Project management for engineering, business and
technology. London: Routledge.