The Strategic Project Management Office:
Projects to Enterprise (SPMO)

Discover how to design and implement a strategic project management office (SPMO) to support your organization's strategic objectives

I'm ready, how do I start? In The Strategic Project Management Office: Projects to Enterprise, you'll learn the wide range of proven approaches and emerging concepts for aligning engagements, programs, and projects with an organization's strategic objectives. With a strategic project management office (SPMO) you can enable the effective implementation of organizational strategy through engagements, portfolios, programs, and projects.

Part of the Stanford Advanced Project Management curriculum, this three-day elective course combines the latest research from Stanford with the world of practical strategy execution. This course provides proven techniques for creating SPMO's to support the achievement of your organization's strategic objectives.

Students create an Strategic Project Management Office for each of three complex, global case studies during the course. On the final day, the class conducts an innovative simulation of various real-world scenarios for each of the case studies with real-time changes to the business environment.

The Strategic Project Management Office: Projects to Enterprise can be taken on campus at Stanford University, onsite at your organization, through synchronous live virtual advanced project management courses, or via streaming video in our online Stanford Advanced Project Management program.

Benefits to the Organization

As a result of The Strategic Project Management Office: Projects to Enterprise, your organization will benefit from:

A new understanding of the best ways to design and implement SPMO's for large, complex programs and projects
Improved understanding of how SPMO's can enable strategy execution
Senior managers being able to identify the best organizational structures for executing corporate strategies using engagements, programs, and projects
Strengthened opportunities for faster and more effective development of new products and services

Learning Objectives

After attending The Strategic Project Management Office: Projects to Enterprise, you will be able to:

Answer why an SPMO may be needed for complex programs and projects
Define what an SPMO is and the activities it may perform that cannot be done as well elsewhere in the organization, especially as an agent of change
Determine the best SPMO design, given your desired outcomes, demands, and needs, and how to best implement it
Assess the political environment, identify forces that support (or thwart) effective SPMO operation, and navigate them successfully
Provide, as needed, a consistent SPMO framework across the enterprise
Determine how to leverage your SPMO practice for greater impact on the organization and its strategy
Address typical real-world challenges in running an SPMO and apply practices learned during a reality dive simulation

Target Audience

This course is designed for managers of program managers and project managers, program managers and managers of large projects, project office directors and staff, and functional managers. This course helps you recognize what is working and what else can be done to ensure that your SPMO's create value by enabling the achievement of your organization's strategic objectives.

Prerequisites: While this course has no prerequisites, participants will benefit most from the course if they have previously completed the Converting Strategy Into Action course from the Stanford APM curriculum.

Course Topics

Rationale for an SPMO

Operations vs. programs
SPMO program activities and options matrices
Why SPMO's are important and what their benefits are

Defining an SPMO

Desired outcomes drive SPMO design and structure
SPMO case study
Strategic Execution Framework (SEF): it’s the environment: culture, structure, and strategy
SPMO activities: process development and integration, tools and templates, team support, planning support, execution support, portfolio management support, training, intellectual capital management, metrics, coaching and mentoring, mastering methodology leadership

Implementing an SPMO

SPMO implementation requires managing as a project
Manage SPMO implementation as a project plan
Success factors: sponsorship, selling, and funding the SPMO
Organizational position, physical location, level of centralization
SPMO scope of authority
SPMO metrics
Factors for SPMO team success, guides for virtual teams
Leading and staffing the SPMO
Sourcing SPMO activities
What high-value SPMO's do: individual level, team level, organization level
Options for the SPMO to provide program/project managers
Invigorating problem programs/projects
Options for communicating about the SPMO
Using force field analysis to address challenges to SPMO success
SPMO implementation checklist

SPMO Politics & Organizational Change

Definitions of power and politics
Assessing your environment
Agreement on facts, goals, and approach (matrix tool)
Centrality: connectedness, closeness, betweenness
Types of power: legitimate, reward, expert, informational, coercive, referent, position power, person power
Political/stakeholder analysis with power-interest matrix (PIM)
Leading change: SPMO, neuroscience, and organizational change
SPMO and organizational change decision matrix (traditionalist, adjuster, developer, revolutionary)
Matrix for assessing SPMO change impacts
SPMO and politics: checklist

Lessons Learned & Knowledge Brokering

Cycle of knowledge creation
Why sharing knowledge is important; why ideas don’t spread
Types of knowledge brokers: problem-driven internal, solution-driven internal, or external brokers
Knowledge brokering cycle
Knowledge brokering and learning from failure; importance of culture; examples
Knowledge brokering: checklist

High-performance SPMO's

Cultivating: organizational impact, metrics-reuse, benchmarking
Examples of SPMO reporting
Integration issues: supplier, individual contractor
Learn from lessons learned and reviews
Maintain customer focus and sponsorship involvement

SPMO Reality Dive

Reality dive simulation with real-world operational scenarios
Final action plan and course review