Project Management Institute Announces Finalists of the 2019 Project Management Office (PMO) of the Year Award

PHILADELPHIA-- Today, Project Management Institute (PMI), the world’s leading association for the project management profession, announced the finalists of the 2019 Project Management Office (PMO) of the Year Award. The PMO of the Year Award® honors a PMO that has added value to its organization through its support of successful strategic initiatives and demonstrated superior organizational project management capabilities. It also recognizes a PMO that has established a vision for value delivery and has had a positive and clear impact on business results.

This year’s award winner will be announced on Tuesday, 5 November, in Aurora, Colorado as part of PMI’s eighth annual PMO Symposium® being held at the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center. Below are the three PMO of the Year Award Finalists.

Washington, D.C., USA

A mere eight years young, the Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) at Fannie Mae started by bringing responsible standards, methodologies, and processes to the organization’s projects. While they were successful in doing that, they now are the sought-out advisors and informers of the data and information needed to make strategic decisions. Overall, they support the mission of their organization, which is to provide access to affordable mortgage credit in all markets, at all times.

Since their creation, the goal of Fannie Mae’s EPMO has been to “Enable High Impact Change Delivery” by ensuring transparency so Fannie Mae IT and business leaders can make informed prioritization and execution decisions -- all while ensuring alignment with the strategic direction of the enterprise. Their EPMO has focused on continuously maturing program governance -- both qualitatively and quantitatively -- and focusing on cutting edge methodologies and best practices. They have evolved their processes to support both agile and waterfall project management methodologies and invested in tools to maximize governance effectiveness. Their service offerings have grown from managing projects to managing programs and portfolios -- and they now serve as the liaison between the business outcomes and the delivery programs to better ensure value delivery.

McDonald's Corporation: Global Technology PMO

Chicago, Illinois, USA

In December 2016, McDonald’s established the Global Technology PMO (GTPMO) led by Amy Martin to support the strategic initiative of deploying Mobile Order and Pay capabilities to over 20,000 restaurants by the end of 2017. The GTPMO is responsible for the global deployment of kiosk technologies to enable the “Experience of the Future” in McDonald’s restaurants worldwide, the introduction of customer relationship management (CRM) and loyalty capabilities, the enablement of technologies to support new menu strategies and restaurant innovations, and the global deployment of delivery solutions in partnership with UberEats.

The GTPMO has created the GTPMO framework which led to increased agility and transparency in managing end-to-end core development and market deployment plans. The success of the GTPMO can be understood by the fact that other teams within McDonald’s are now seeking out the GTPMO to help them establish their PMO processes and standards. As of the end of 2018, the GTPMO had successfully managed and deployed Mobile Order & Pay capabilities to over 22,000 restaurants globally, self-order kiosks in over 17,000 restaurants, and expanded delivery to over half of the global McDonald's system. As they look into the future, the GTPMO aims to be 100% Agile certified by end of 2019, and be fully trained to manage the execution of phase-gate processes, a project management technique that divides projects into phases separated by decision points known as “gates.”

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

In 2010, Saudi Aramco established a Project Management Office to replace a former Project Support and Control Department. Since its inception, the PMO has dealt with a large project portfolio -- averaging around 200 projects a year. By enhancing up-front planning and the definition and clarification of stakeholder’s roles and responsibilities, Saudi Aramco projects have seen an improvement of 26% in project process governance, which in-turn reduced the overall project cycle time by 22%. The PMO also improved the Project Scheduled Performance Index by 18% and Cost Performance Index by 17%, compared to numbers prior to establishment of the PMO. The PMO also improved other Key Performance Index (KPI) areas, including the Operational Excellence Index, Knowledge Management Performance Index, Professional Certification Index, and Facilitation Services Index. The PMO’s implementation of value improvement practices has added clarity to project objectives and simplified scope definitions. The successful utilization of value improvement practices has resulted in cost avoidance of over USD$1 billion in CAPEX and Lifecycle costs for the capital program.

About Project Management Institute (PMI)

Project Management Institute (PMI) is the world's leading association for those who consider project, program or portfolio management their profession. Through global advocacy, collaboration, education and research, we work to prepare more than three million professionals around the world for The Project Economy: the coming economy in which work, and individuals, are organized around projects. Celebrating our 50^th anniversary in 2019, we work in nearly every country around the world to advance careers, improve organizational success and further mature the project management profession through globally-recognized standards, certifications, communities, resources, tools, academic research, publications, professional development courses and networking opportunities. As part of the PMI family, ProjectManagement.com creates online global communities that deliver more resources, better tools, larger networks and broader perspectives.