Project Management Institute (PMI) has a new community that is launching this Friday; the Organizational Project Management (OPM) Community of Practice (COP.) It is a virtual community of project management professionals that will talk about how to integrate project, program, portfolio management practices with the management infrastructure of an organization.

Project work is important. This blog spends a lot of time talking about how to improve the tools, techniques and disciplines around performing project, program and portfolio work. Staying focused on incrementally improving project management domain disciplines is needed to improve consistently and predictably delivering project results. The only problem is that many organizations don’t need incremental improvements. They need big improvements to stay ahead of the big economic, customer, market and external pressures that the market or other stakeholders demand.

So the question to big bang improvements lies in two areas.

1)       Aligning project work with strategic direction

2)       Providing project work that benefits operations or provides revenue from customers

The portfolio domain has identified practices that allow project spending to be identified, tracked, monitored and optimized. The Organizational Project Management COP wants to additionally influence leadership actions that facilitate successful discussions when monitoring the health or re-optimization of projectized spend.

The program domain states that benefits must be indentified. The Organizational Project Management COP additionally wants to discuss practices and philosophies that apply this concept to real project practices.

In your experience, which one is your organizations biggest pain point; aligning to the strategic direction or providing project work that really helps operations or grows revenue? Would love your comments.

Do you want to write a chapter in the premiere book on Organizational Project Management?

Project Management Institute (PMI) is currently reviewing a business case to start a new Virtual Community (VC) on Organizational Project Management. It is anticipated that PMI(r) will launch this VC in the fall of ’09. This community will provide information to project management practitioners. This VC will also target organizational business management leaders on topics of specific interest to them. It provides a forum for topics on Organizational Project Management (OPM) and aims to create knowledge about the interfaces among projects, programs and portfolios, how projects benefit the ongoing operations in organizations and how strategic objectives are attained through projects.

There is a conference call to introduce the goals, time line and participation requirements. I’m holding two calls; Thursday 7/23 at 5pm PT and 7/24 Friday at 6am PT as we have global interest in this project. The call will also be recorded if you are not able to attend:

Again the conference call information is:

Thursday 7/23 at 5pm PT 8pm ET and Friday 7/24 at 6am PT //9amET

The conference call phone number is:

1-218-862-7200 Bridge #: 684904

Feel free to contact me before the call if you have any questions.