Patrick Quirk

The Commonwealth of Kentucky had failed multiple times at establishing such an enterprise PMO, so I went into the effort with eyes wide open and armed with lessons learned from peers who had led those prior efforts. Through the strong support of the CIO and by collaborating with the various stakeholders, we developed an approach to the PMO and reporting to the CIO that wasn’t overly burdensome but provided valuable insights into the health of the IT project portfolio. The collaborative nature continued through the implementation effort that included ongoing training, communication, and coaching of project managers across the enterprise.

In response to CFPB findings, I was brought in to establish sound project management practices for the legal and compliance team and to implement those for their CFPB remediation effort, from planning through execution. This included aligning with the broader organization’s Agile adoption efforts and training/coaching members of both the legal/compliance team and certain IT team members and other business areas on project management and Agile practices. Near the end of the engagement, we were tasked with leading the legal and compliance department through a strategic planning effort to establish a roadmap for their future initiatives.

The client organization initially treated all work as a service request. Establishing the PMO included categorizing work as either a service request or a project and implementing the project work processes. This reporting started with the sales pipeline and went through the project lifecycle, ending with customer satisfaction surveys.

Without the use of AI, I created 200 questions to evaluate an individual’s knowledge of the Microsoft Project with a focus on real-world application over book knowledge. Questions spanned MS Project Professional, MS Project Online, and integrations with tools such as Teams, PowerBI, and SharePoint.