Project Server - Project hand-over process from PMO to PM

Recently i was creating a Project hand-over process for PMO, where after performing required PMO activities the Project has to hand-over to the Project Manager for the execution. The process comprises of list of activities that Project Managers have to perform to accept the project from PMO so that he/she can continue with the execution of the Project. These activities involves the Project Owner and Status Manager fields of the Project and i thought this of a good share as i haven't seen much about the use/advantages of Status Manager and Owner field of the Project. I also can see more and more organization in my region tend to establish PMO for better Project Management, and that requires the users to understand the role of the Status Manager and Owner of the Project.

Microsoft Project Server 2010/2007 uses two fields to track the leadership of any enterprise project. The Owner field lists the person who created the project and saved it initially in the Project Server database. The Status Manager fields lists the person who initially published the resource assignments in the project using the Publish button. The Status Manager is the person who receives task updates in PWA from team members assigned to the tasks in the project. Now depending on your organization policy and requirement, you can change either the Owner of the project, the Status Manager of the project, or both the Owner and Status Manager of the project as part of the hand-over process.

PMO Role:

After receiving the Project Schedule along with any other required documents, Project Charter etc., following activities PMO could do:

• Baseline the Project, to identify any variance later with the current values.
• Fill-in any PMO required Project custom fields
• Save and Publish the project to the server
• Change the owner of the Project to the respective Project Manager of the Project from the PWA

Project Manager Role:

Once received notification from the PMO about the Project been saved on the server, following activities should be performed by the Project Manager to make sure that he/she wont miss any task updates from the resources.

• Open the project in Project Professional 2010.
• (If required) Change any generic/local resources with the enterprise resources in the project.
• Apply any Task view, such as the Gantt Chart view. 
• Right-click on the column header to the right of the Task Name column and select Insert Column from the shortcut menu.

• Select the Status Manager field from the list of available fields.
• Click the Status Manager pick list and select your name from the list for every regular task that you must manage.

• Save and Publish the Project so that the changes can take effect.

There are few interesting points you will observe when you insert the status manager field in the Ms Project, the field drop down will list all the previous status managers of the project in-addition to your name. Any of your Project user with the open/save/publish project to the server permission, when open the project can able to set themselves as the status manager of the activities belongs to them. This is one of another awesome advantage of the Status Manager, alteast i rate it awesome and always highlight this to my users/attendees, that it let you have more than one approver in the same project plan. This particularly applies to the large projects where more than one Project Manager are involved, and each one of them is responsible for their set of activities in the project.

As usual your comments, feedback are widely welcome.

Posted in: PMO,Project Server Features