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In this episode we feature an interview between Cornelius Fichtner and Corbin Links, host of the Identity Management Podcast. The interview was originally recorded for Corbin’s show but is also being released here on The Project Management Podcast.

Corbin and Cornelius discuss the essential skills needed to manage large, multi-year, multi-million-dollar projects and explore how the role of the project manager evolves into that of a project leader. Cornelius emphasizes leadership, communication, motivation, and even political acumen as critical success factors for project leaders.

The conversation also covers the role and value of the Project Management Office (PMO), based on survey findings from over 500 project managers. Cornelius shares that PMOs deliver the most value through company-wide standardization of project management practices and improved consistency across teams.

Other topics include the Standish Group Chaos Report findings on project failure, the impact of restarts, cost and schedule overruns, and strategies to improve project success rates. Cornelius also discusses the importance of user involvement, executive support, clear requirements, and realistic expectations.

Later in the discussion, Cornelius highlights the opportunities created by economic downturns, the risks of relying too heavily on tools ("a fool with a tool is still a fool"), and his perspective on the growing importance of project management as a profession. He also introduces his PMP training program, The PM PrepCast, which helps students prepare for the PMP exam through podcast-based learning.

Topics discussed include:

• The evolution from project manager to project leader
• Essential leadership and communication skills
• Managing politics on large projects
• The true value and purpose of the PMO
• Common causes of project failure (based on the Chaos Report)
• How to recover from restarts and maintain momentum
• Why “a fool with a tool is still a fool”
• Opportunities for project managers in tough economic times
• Overview of The PM PrepCast and PMP exam requirements

Listen in for practical insights, a few laughs, and timeless lessons about leadership and professionalism in project management.

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In December of 2008 I was invited to be the host at the 2009 PMO Summit in Coconut Grove, Florida. As the host, it was my privilege to set the tone of the day and begin with a short, 10 minute keynote presentation to set the tone for summit.

I decided that (because I had never seen anything like it before) that I would create a short survey to determine the value of the PMO. I did so and over 500 people responded. This video shows the results of this survey.

It was at that PMO summit that I met Terry Doerscher from Planview and you have heard him as a guest in the previous 2 episodes. In one of them he presented the PMO 2.0 Survey Results. So it was indeed interesting for me to see that other people had done similar surveys and it was also interesting to see that our surveys both complemented and contradicted each other a bit. This was definitely due to the fact that his survey was much more in-depth while this one here was really just trying to take the pulse of the podcast audience.

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In our last episode we heard Terry Doerscher discuss the results of the Planview PMO 2.0 Survey Report.

So I decided this week to follow up with Terry. We discuss what PMO 2.0 means to him, where PMOs bring the biggest benefit to a company, whether they should be centralized or decentralized and we discuss the 8 functions which he says are the primary functions that a PMO should support: gathering Information, managing demand, perform analysis, coordinate collaborations, identify issues, manage capacity, provide processes & tools and deliver internal consulting.

Oh… and we also discuss PMO 1.0 and PMO 3.0

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In this episode we welcome Terry Doerscher, who is Planview's Chief Process Architect and we discuss the PMO 2.0 Survey Report that was released earlier this year. The survey was sent out in September of 2008 and it contains 455 responses from a diverse group of companies. It was a rather large survey that required a lot of patience from the respondents.

Questions in the survey focused on PMO performance, operational challenges, organizational challenges, and the organization's future plans. The most surprising result that Terry found was that the PMO had increased the scope of the service within the companies. It is no longer just a Project Management Office, but that they are now reaching out to broader involvement of resource and operations management throughout the complete organization.

In our last episode we announced the giveaway of 2 PM Lectures Leadership Challenges of Complex Projects. And the winners are: Joseph Horowitz (Premium Podcast Subscriber) and Mohammed Amin (Free Podcast Listener). Congratulations!