I was asked by the CEO to set up a PMO to manage the four product lines for our company, including all of the projects, processes, resourcing, planning, templates, documentation, and staff. The four product teams were acting as separate teams and there was not a unified resource plan and roadmap for the combined teams even though the teams often had to collaborate to complete projects. The product teams did not accomplish resourcing holistically in the manner projects needed to be completed and instead thought of them as product linesThis resulted in conflicting priorities by each team and ultimately not hitting target dates doing too many projects at once with a limited set of resources from the teams. There was also a lack of consistency in processes, templates, and procedures from the four different product lines which was resulting in missing steps to the process and a lack of clear communication across the organization and to our customers.

First, I established the mission of the PMO and obtained sponsor support of the mission and PMO direction.

I conducted a current state analysis to determine and document the as-is state of the product organization.

I worked with the teams and leadership to create one agreed to prioritized roadmap (this resulted in fewer agreed to projects, but a much more realistic and possible roadmap)

I established one resource plan for the four product lines based on the agreed to roadmap. These scoped projects were based on when teams were needed for the projects and planned based on team capacity.

I defined a set of processes, standards, templates and procedures for all four product lines that resulted in consistent methods between product teams based on my current state analysis and collaborating with the teams.

I streamlined the process for documentation and release notes across the organization to ensure a consistent approach and to prioritize documentation in the product managers processes.