The roles of the project management office in the execution of the organization’s strategic plan
Abstract
Many organisations in both public and private sectors are striving to discover new tools and strategies to streamline their project implementation. Among these was the project management office (PMO), which has been developed from the womb of the advanced project management methodology. This work is both exploratory and causal study, which concentrates on investigating the effectiveness of seven proposed PMO roles (as independent variables) in carrying out the strategic plan (as the dependent variable) of the public sector organisations in the UAE. The study aims also to derive some insights into coordinating pattern established between PMO entity and other departments involved in the project implementation within the context of the organization’s strategic plan. A Likert-based questionnaire has been structured to cover all aspects of the research questions and hypotheses. The survey hyperlink emailed to 19 project-based public organizations in Abu Dhabi and Dubai Emirates (as business centres) prior to broadcasting among their 450 staff members who involved actively in the various project business. 366 participants viewed the survey link, whereas 268 of them responded with perfect and usable questionnaires. The received data analysed quantitatively by using multiple regression. The analysis outputs, as expected, have indicated that 95% of the targeted organizations established own PMO. The high visibility of PMO allowed robust investigation on the connections between various PMO roles in executing the strategic plan of the hosted organizations to reveal a number of statistically significant linkages between various variables. The top-five PMO roles involved in strategic plan execution were found to be i) Strategic Management, ii) development of project management competencies and methodology, iii) monitoring and controlling project performance, iv) organizational learning, and v) organization structure and communication improvement. Whereas 12 top metric criteria were identified to measure the effectiveness of the PMO unit. These findings utilized in developing a conceptual PMO model to be flexible and applicable with similar project management methodology in various business domains, and paving the way for more investigations. This study gives some implications for those involved in the PMO applications, and recommendations to further research studies.