the chief project officer and how one can benefit your organization

The Chief Project Officer and How One Can Benefit Your Organization

Ed Kozak

The term Chief Project Officer, or

CPO, might not be commonly known in many industries but it is a term that many organizations should commit to memory. A CPO is a single individual at the Senior Management level who is responsible for providing governance over the organization’s internal projects.

Why Project Governance Is Needed At the Senior Management Level

Successful organizations in many industries have discovered, albeit, after-the-fact for some, that they need to enhance the communication between Management and their project teams. This need for governance at a senior level has grown out of necessity to ensure that project teams and internal investment capital is used strategically. Only someone at the senior level has the authority and wherewithal to link projects with strategic goals and to reach horizontally across departments to review expenditures and schedules, to regulate resource utilization, and to cancel projects that no longer are in alignment with strategic objectives. This representation must be able to perform the following tasks:

• link all projects to strategic and operational business plans;

• make sure that every project supports the right business goals;

• require that every project have an effective manager or leader in charge;

• implement and maintain an appropriate PM methodology;

• rigorously and formally manage changes to project scope, budget, schedule, and requirements;

• group similar projects to manage them in a similar manner; and

• implement, lead and coordinate project portfolio management.

Many have tried to achieve this governance in the past by creating a project management office, or PMO, at their sites. Unfortunately for many organizations, this costly endeavor has not been successful, providing limited, or no, value. The reason is easy to explain. A PMO is not for every organization and few organizations have performed due diligence on the PMO to determine whether it was suitable for them, or whether they were suitable for a PMO. Instead, many saw the benefits that PMOs provided to others—oftentimes lauded in financial or management journals—and decided that they must implement the same, without giving careful examination to what exactly they wanted to achieve.

Gerald Kendall and Steven Rollins, in their book Advanced Project

The Chief Project Officer and How One Can Benefit Your Organization© Successful Projects For Leaders. No portion of this document may be copied or distributed without the expressed written consent of the author.

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Management and the PMO: Multiplying ROI At Warp Speed, cite specific reasons why PMOs fail. These are:

• The PMO did not define its value proposition. PMOs should strive to demonstrate tangible value in the first three months in terms of improving project delivery speed.

• The PMO is not perceived as impacting project delivery abilities

• The PMO is seen as a threat — most often too authoritative

• The PMO is too low in the management reporting structure

• The PMO does not have buy-in from the senior functional managers

• Project Management Overhead — the bad PMO acronym

• The PMO is micromanaging — trying to control every project directly

Furthermore, they state that, contrary to one of the reasons why organizations originally justified the creation of a PMO, a PMO should not bear the responsibility of project planning, scheduling, risk identification & management, and monitoring & control.Too often, individual project managers feel that a PMO is needed at their respective organizations and lobby for the creation of one. On one hand, it provides them with an entity knowledgeable about project management that has the ability to make timely decisions that they feel is above their station. However, many project managers incorrectly also feel that it

should relieve them of some of the responsibilities that they deem to be overly-bureaucratic or tedious, like planning, documentation, and monitoring and control—something that should never be taken out of the project manager’s hands to perform. So, whether it be from internal pressure or from a willingness to try to capture the gains other organizations have, many organizations jumped on the business process reengineering bandwagon and created PMOs, only to realize that they’re not getting much value from them and that support for the PMO is waning.

The ultimate question that the successful organization must ask is “Does it make sense?” Does it make sense to create a department and departmental org structure, complete with possible layers of management and administrative help, to improve the way projects are conducted and sustain that level of improvement? There are certainly legitimate reasons for an organization to have project governance at the senior level:

• The organization is highly-fragmented and functional in nature, with difficulty coordinating all the team activities.

• There is a lack of any connection between Management and project groups along with no structured, consistent and meaningful flow of information between these two groups.

• Individual project teams identifying and desiring projects related to their segments.


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• Senior management is not able to properly prioritize the collective initiatives.

• Historically, projects have not been aligned with strategic objectives to ensure that projects are contributing to growth, competitive advantage, revenue, cash flow, or other objectives of the organization.

• There is a lack of full-time oversight for and across all projects that includes monitoring against established criteria and advising Management of status and issues that would affect the planned benefits of projects.

• There is a need to ensure that standards are established, communicated, and enforced on an enterprise-wide basis so that project governance can be conducted relative to strategic goals.

• There has been a failure of management to establish cross-departmental coordination toward goals for products, services, and customers.

However, there must be some middle ground in-between having no governance and having a bureaucratic entity suck up overhead dollars while providing no value.

Behold the Chief Project Officer

One of the best things about having a CPO position is its versatility. This is something that can and should be instituted by all organizations for which

it would be suitable, whether a start-up or mature.

For the start-up looking to launch its first product, add to or enhance its existing product line, or increase its market penetration, having a CPO on staff makes perfect sense. The responsibility of the CPO would be to see that product development schedules are met. Consider the huge opportunity costs for the company if there were delays in getting the product to market. There is also a tendency for many organizations to add to or change the scope of their projects mid-stream, to add more and more functionality or expand the scope of ongoing developments. Although well-intentioned, the delays and rework costs can severely impact the project and the organization. A CPO is very valuable in these cases by creating a formal change control policy and leading a change control board, objectively regulating which changes are made and which ones are tabled. I’ve attended many a panel discussion given by venture capitalists and in every single one of these a VC will state that “they would rather fund a B idea with an A team than an A idea with a B team.” A CPO on the team can help achieve or maintain that A status.

Mature companies must also evaluate whether they’re suitable or not for a PMO or simply to have someone on staff as a CPO. An assessment must be made on the number of projects conducted by a company within a given year and the nature of those projects. If so many projects are being conducted that they become a hindrance to each other and it creates a scenario that’s far too complex for one person at the organization to


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properly be debriefed on, ensure that no resource conflicts occur, and provide senior-level governance, then establishing a PMO certainly makes sense. If not, then it is overkill and the CPO makes more sense.

Project Management Offices (PMOs)

aren’t suitable for every company and not every company is suitable for a PMO. A less-expensive, more flexible, more-agile, and more-suitable solution for many organizations is to have a single person on the Senior Management Team, the Chief Project Officer (CPO), be responsible for project governance and to ensure that the right kind of information is flowing to the rest of that team. Only the success of its projects can truly guarantee the success of a company.

About the Author

Ed Kozak, M.S., M.B.A., PMP is the President and CEO of Successful Projects For Leaders, international experts in project management process improvement. The staff of Successful Projects For Leaders work with companies along three main points of focus. First, they help companies improve their profitability by cutting wasteful project costs (upwards to 50% or more) and improve their overall management of projects in order to reduce risk, schedule slippage, and unnecessary spending on product rework. As a result their clients are able to exert more control over their projects; improve target schedule performance; monitor and control cost performance

better; increase their success at hitting budget estimates; improve quality and satisfaction; and recognize the substantial financial benefits that come along with that.

Second, Successful Projects For Leaders is hired as project turnaround experts and is brought in on critical projects that are in the midst of schedule, budget, and/or quality issues or projects that are having continual setbacks. They analyze the problems, set a new budget and schedule, and work with the incumbent project management team to bring them to completion.

A third benefit that Successful Projects For Leaders offers is their availability to be out-sourced by Organizations to serve as the Chief Projects Officer. In this role, Successful Projects For Leaders only develops standards and practices directed at the effective execution of projects and the attainment of schedule, cost, scope, and quality objectives, but also communicates enterprise-level objectives to the respective project groups in the most-appropriate way for them to follow and communicates project information to Management. This overcomes the problem common to many organizations that no connection between Operations and project groups exists and no structured, consistent, and meaningful flow of information between these two groups occurs, allowing Management to determine if efforts are efficient and effective, if projects are still the best ones to support strategic objectives, whether there are performance issues associated with meeting objectives.


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Ed is an accomplished professional with has over twenty-three years experience as a consultant, manager, executive, facilitator, and instructor that includes project/program manager experience in the private and Government sectors managing multi-year, multi-million dollar programs for his clients in fields such as IT, healthcare, research, development, and manufacturing. He brings his expertise to management teams in strategic planning, process re-engineering, program management offices, and project management and is a frequent conference speaker.


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the chief project officer and how one can benefit your organization

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