What is an ePMO?

An Enterprise Program Management Office, or ePMO, is an entity charged with management of one or more programs and portfolio of systems or perhaps specifically with the integration of those systems. The ePMO concept or title began appearing in print about 5 years ago, but despite the amount of time that's passed since then, the practice of ePMOs haven't progresses much beyond the original PMO paradigms.

In other words, the ePMO has yet to be fully realized but for a few exceptions. The obvious question is why isn't this occurring more rapidly? Some might feel that the charter for an ePMO is beyond the scope of what most PMOs are charged to accomplished. It might be considered dangerous or out of scope to try to plan for ore manage relationships and interactions that occur around the PMO rather than within it.

The problem with this thinking though, is that nearly every IT focused PMO is now expected to integrate within the larger context of their enterprise. Even non-IT PMOs feel the pressure for increased oversight and accountability and all PMOs share one characteristic in common - complexity.

The complexity that must be managed in order to successfully execute a program is perhaps the single greatest challenge facing leadership today. The advantage with an ePMO that is designed to be an enterprise PMO from the ground up is that complexity is tackled directly, with mitigation built into a set of fused processes...



Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

Legal & Ethical Implications of PLM

There are actually quite a few fascinating legal and ethical implications surrounding the practice construct for PLM. The reason for this is simple; Program Management Offices (PMOs) are the places which control funding, contracts and oversight for almost all IT projects and many other types of projects as well. Thus, PMOs by nature are the organizations charged with managing legal or liability issues. Liability issues encompass a wide spectrum of topics including, but not limited to:

• Financial liability due to non-performance
• Financial liability due to negligence
• Legal liability due to contract disputes
• Legal liability due to product failure or non-compliance
• Legal liability due to security breaches, information privacy failure
• Legal liability due to information freedom of speech related issues

Because of these and other related issues, PMOs are the places charged with supporting or conducting risk management or risk assurance processes. These processes though are only as effective as the data which support them. Risk Management is one of the sub-processes supported by the PLM “meta-process,” the idea being that all risks are related to tangible requirements and all requirements are then related to projects, programs and portfolios. So, PLM is both an enabling technology as well as a way to help place issues in their proper context within the larger enterprise picture. Given its focus, there could be potentially significant liability issues associated with PLM as a solution.

IT and ethics are generally not discussed in the same context. The reason for this is simple, people who work with data understand how easily it can be manipulated and in many cases clients are specifically interested in seeing data manipulated to suit various agendas. The introduction of the ethics discussion can often become very uncomfortable for the many folks who aren’t aware that this is happening and this is perhaps the main reason it so seldom occurs.

The management of organizations is an extremely subjective exercise, there isn’t a clearly defined comprehensive canon of ethics per se, just specific legislation here and there to prohibit or restrict certain practices that have been found to be problematic. From a service provider perspective, the key thing to keep in mind for PLM is that any set of decisions will be better served if the right data is available to the right stakeholders at the right time. Ultimately, the folks running the ePMO will determine the rules that focus on issues and data important to them. If an organization chooses to ignore critical data or attempt to change the nature of data provided to them then that clearly falls outside of the boundaries of liability for the PLM service provider.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

Welcome to the PLM Blog

Hello and welcome to the Program Lifecycle Management – “PLM” Blog.

This Blog is dedicated to examining the concept, methodology and practice of PLM. Program Lifecycle Management is an innovative new approach to supporting the Enterprise Program Management Office (ePMO). While PLM was designed with IT projects in mind it is equally applicable to any other type of program office as well.

On this site we will provide presentations, case studies, tips and open discussion on issues related to this new field. Thanks for stopping by and we hope you enjoy your visits here…