City of Phoenix Case Study
The City of Phoenix has had a Project Management Office (PMO) for well over a decade but evidence from stakeholders indicated that it was not operating as well as intended. The City Auditors Department was tasked with evaluating the PMO and the City’s enterprise projects to learn more about what was working well and where there were areas of opportunity for improvement, but they lacked the internal capability to perform a detailed audit and selected the Project Strategy Consulting Group over ten other proposing firms to perform the work effort for them.
Overview
The County of Fresno’s Department of Social Service is a regional municipal entity in the United States with 2600 employees and an information technology (IT) support group of 48 personnel. The organization had been struggling to understand why technology projects have been severely mismanaged and why routine operational activities seem to require tremendous time and effort to complete. IT staff indicated they felt overworked and overwhelmed and the executive management team was unable to determine whether or not additional personnel need to be hired to help manage the increasing workload effectively.
Outcomes
After examining the PMO using the Project Management Institute’s OPM3 maturity model, the Project Strategy Consulting Group team noted that the front-end aspects of IT service management activities were predominantly non-existent within the organization. Such activities include such things as creating a viable organizational strategy with goals, objectives, and supporting critical success factors and key performance indicators; the governance of priorities and changes; establishing expectations for IT services; and defining desired work outcomes of the IT group. Indeed, as far as performing IT services, the IT group was dedicated, knowledgeable, and capable. Their primary challenges were constantly changing priorities and the continual reallocation of IT resources in both project-based and operational activities.
Summary
The Project Strategy Consulting Group worked closely with the executive leadership team of the organization to help them develop an overarching strategy which was able to be decomposed into criteria useable by the IT group to help develop a supporting IT strategy. Governance and reporting mechanisms were emplaced and clearly delineated IT service level management functions were established. Stakeholders are exceptionally pleased that the work processes for the IT group have stabilized and that priorities are known and resources allocated appropriately. IT staff are uniform in their support of the effort, indicating high levels of job satisfaction that had not previously been the case. Most significantly, no need for additional headcount in the IT shop was needed to achieve the desired outcomes.
