PMO Model Applied Research In The Real Estate Project Management

With the gradual transition of China’s real estate market from the first stage theIndustry Consolidation Life Cycle (proposed by AT Kearney, Germany) to the secondstage, mergers and acquisitions as well as integration within the real estate industryhave become the norm. Those small and micro real estate companies which arepreviously able to survive by means of regional competitive advantage find that it isdifficult for them to find living space in the fierce market competition. Even thosemedium-sized or larger real estate companies also find that if depending on theprevious extensive project development model, they will not be profitable. They haveto conduct sophisticated management in every real estate project, thus they can ensurethat each new project will achieve their financial goals and management objectivesdetermined in advance with a lower risk. If they conduct sophisticated management inevery real estate project, they have to build a platform in order to accumulate all thevaluable and reusable resources of their previous projects. At the same time, theymust very clearly determine the reusable resources they need to get from this projectat the beginning of each project, and they use powerful implementation system toguide the project progress toward the goal set in advance. The most popular practiceusing this management model currently is the implementation of PMO, namelyproject management office model.For enterprises, especially for those real estate enterprises trying to developstrategic project management capabilities in order to maintain and enhance theircompetitiveness, the establishment of a Project Management Office (ProjectManagement Office, referred to as PMO) and make full use of its managementfunction is a good organization design choice. The PMO is introduced, mainly inorder to strengthen the "enterprise-level management" of projects, in order to cultivate strong enterprise-level project management capabilities, rather than toreplace the company’s project department or project management.Before the introduction of PMO, the majority of our real estate enterprises do notcompletely have no enterprise-level management of projects. In fact, more or lessthere is some related mechanisms in operation, such as the establishment ofplanning-operation department, the general manager’s office or inter-departmentalcoordination council, the project summary-evaluation mechanisms, respectivelyassume a number of functions of enterprise-level project management. Theintroduction of the PMO is to make these mechanisms more systematic,routine-oriented, so as to improve the enterprise-level project management to a newlevel.This paper deeply analyzes the benefits PMO may bring to companies and theproblems businesses may face during the application of PMO, and it takes a realestate project which applies PMO model for an example. This example demonstratesthat the PMO model can really help companies improve their management level, helpthe reused resources of the project be accumulated effectively, help companies solvemany difficult problems in the multi-project management. This paper studies theproblems a typical real estate project encountered and its practical coping strategies inthe application of PMO model. It analyzes the feasibility of the PMO model’s beingwidely used in China’s real estate industry; it is forward-looking, and it has muchapplication reference value in terms of enhancing the overall management level of thereal estate industry.This paper concluded that the majority of China’s real estate companies arealready project-oriented companies with large scale, the traditional single projectmanagement model is being replaced by parallel multi-project management mode inthese companies, as a typical example of multi-project management model, and PMOshould be rapidly popularized and applied in these companies. Because of theapplication features of the PMO, if PMO is applied in very small projects, its valuecan not be fully reflected. However, the real estate enterprises themselves have largescales, so PMO is particularly suitable for popularization and application in the realestate industry, it will help to significantly enhance the management level of the real estate enterprises.