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Saudi Arabia has been carrying out significant economic improvements as a part of its 2030 Vision, including reforms to the way of doing business, obtaining construction permits, and improvement across its procurement processes (www.expro.gov.sa.).
Organizations establish Project Management Office (PMO) for many reasons for the purpose of improving projects and project management practices like schedule, cost, risk, and other disciplines of project management (PMBOK, 2021). The seventh edition of the project management body of knowledge PMBOK has dedicated one appendix that provides information about project management offices’ value, forms of PMOs, capabilities, and value realization. A well-implemented PMO can resolve the most challenging project management issues by capturing and transferring knowledge, maximizing the power of cross-functional teams, regulating the demand for integrated technologies, and providing ownership and accountability for key efforts (Desouza et al., 2006).
Establishing PMOs can result in tangible benefits like cost savings, fewer write-offs and rework, higher revenues, higher market share, and intangible benefits like agility in strategic alignment and achievement, enhanced management of resources, better compliance with regulations, and effective decision-making (Hurt et al., 2009). In fact, about fifty percent of the PMOs around the globe are terminated at the early stages of initiation due to the non-realization of the value they add to their organizations (Stanleigh, 2006). Moreover, PMOs that have less authority and management support may have a negative impact on the organization’s objectives. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of a PMO on the projects’ success of organizations in Saudi Arabia.
This study is the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia that studies the connection between PMOs and successful projects which aims at answering the research question “What is the relationship between the existence of PMOs and projects success?”. Answering this question will open horizons for practitioners to look for the weak PMO functions to strengthen and exploit effective functions. Additionally, this work will form the bases for researchers to study the relationship between the existence of PMO and project success in different industries. The next section is an extensive literature review on recent studies about project management offices and project success measures and the gap that might be addressed in this study.