California Project Management Office (CA PMO)

• Understand Your Needs
  • Identify and document your business requirements through collaborative interviews, workshops, and surveys.
  • Develop clear and actionable specifications, such as user stories, use cases, and process flows.
• Optimize Your Processes
  • Analyzing your existing workflows to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.
  • Recommending optimized processes to enhance productivity and service delivery.
• Bridge Communication Gaps
  • Acting as a liaison between your business team and technical staff to clarify needs and expectations.
  • Managing stakeholder engagement and addressing concerns throughout project lifecycles.
• Support Project Success
  • Assist with planning, tracking, and delivering projects on time and within budget.
  • Provide support in developing project artifacts, such as charters, plans, and reports.
• Ensure Quality and Compliance
  • Documenting technical details, workflows, and requirements for your projects.
  • Supporting quality assurance teams to validate solutions meet your needs.
  • Ensuring your systems comply with state and federal regulations.
• Empower Data-Driven Decisions
  • Analyzing data to uncover trends and insights that support your decision-making.
  • Generating reports, dashboards, and visualizations tailored to your requirements.
• Deliver Training and Ongoing Support
  • Developing customized training materials and conducting workshops for your team.
  • Providing ongoing support to resolve issues and ensure a smooth user experience.
• Explore Technology Options
  • Evaluate new technologies to recommend the best fit for your needs.
  • Collaborate with vendors to implement solutions and provide continued support.

• Advise and consult on a structured change management (CM) approach
• Guide the development of a CM Strategy
• Develop a CM Plan
• Train a Change Leader, Team of Change Champions, PMOs and Project Managers in PROSCI/ADKAR processes and best practices
  • PROSCI Methodology
  • ADKAR Framework
  • Preferred Sender Messaging
  • Sponsor development
  • Building a Sponsorship Coalition
  • Resistance Management
  • Enable Enterprise CM (ECM) capability

• Develop a Contract Management Plan.
• Assess, develop and transition contract administration processes.
• Assess budget and invoice tracking for process improvement.

• Develop and validate project cost estimates.

• Advise and consult on Data Cleansing and Migration strategies to help:
  • Plan for and implement an effective Data Migration Strategy
    • Assess legacy data
    • Develop data cleansing and validation strategies
    • Implement data cleansing/validation processes
    • Develop a data migration strategy
    • Implement the data migration strategy
  • Obtain education, guidance and coaching in preparation for
    • Migration (legacy data)
    • Validation
  • Develop a Data Conversion/Migration Plan.
  • Establish and maintain data integrity and quality.

• Assess current governance and develop a Governance Management Plan.

• Ensure planned activities are carried out to deliver the project’s objectives and outputs.
• Ensure project activities are formally finalized, final outputs are delivered, stakeholder acceptance is obtained, project documentation archived, and lessons learned are captured.

• Develop objectives, scope, timelines, strategies and resource requirements to achieve project goals effectively.

• Develop a Quality Management Plan that includes quality assurance and control standards and metrics.
• Train staff to perform deliverable reviews for contract adherence.
• Develop a Test plan.
• Provide User Acceptance Testing (UAT) support.

• Define your requirements
• Track and manage the requirements in a Requirements Traceability Matrix. This spreadsheet will ensure all requirements are:
  • Identified.
  • Tested and delivered.
  • Accepted and tracked.
• Review requirements during negotiations to make sure requirements are clear.
• Set up tools to trace and manage requirements.
• Create a Requirements Management Plan before you sign the system integration contract.
• Provide feedback on how the requirements management process is going and suggest improvements.

• Manage the Risk/Issue register through planning, establishing, monitoring, measuring, and sustaining effective risk management practices throughout the project lifecycle.
• Develop a Risk and Issue Management Plan.
• Assess, mitigate and treat risks and issues.

• Develop a Schedule Management Plan.
• Develop a project schedule.

• Agile Coaching and Mentoring
• Project Delivery Lifecycle
• Financial and budget analysis
• Request For Offer (RFO)/Request For Proposal (RFP) and SOW development
• User Acceptance Testing (UAT) support

Please contact the CA PMO at (916) 873-7281 or pmo@state.ca.gov. We offer a free consultation meeting to discuss your project and will let you know whether we have experts who can help.

No, the CA PMO does not have control agency authority. The CA PMO’s role is similar to a private sector consultant that serves the best interest of the department that hires them. More broadly, the CA PMO provides centralized project management of projects and initiatives, so that strategic benefits are realized through standardized frameworks, education, training, tools, and techniques based on proven best practices and lessons learned.

The CA PMO supports the following service delivery models:

• Project Management Services – Full-time resources dedicated for the duration of the project.
  • Full Engagement – CA PMO will provide a project team to work in partnership with the department for project sponsorship, subject matter experts, and program knowledge. The dedicated team will consist of experienced and knowledgeable project management staff to fully manage and support a project to completion.
  • Balanced Engagement – CA PMO will provide key project resources to augment a department’s existing team. Provides experienced and knowledgeable staff with specific skills and expertise needed to augment existing project teams. This may include a single Project Manager and/or other project professionals.
• Consulting Services – Expert consultants are provided on a temporary basis, to assist projects experiencing challenges or resource shortfalls. Consultants are State staff, and are assigned hourly or monthly.

The engagement model selected is a joint decision between the department and the CA PMO. Specifically, the department chooses the model that seems to best fit their project need and communicates their choice to the CA PMO in the initial meeting. Then, as part of finalizing the Engagement Plan, the CA PMO and department collaborate to ensure the most appropriate engagement model is selected. To assist with this decision, the CA PMO conducts a boots-on-the-ground survey of the project or initiative.

At a high-level, the following criteria is used to select an engagement model:

• Project Criteria
• Scope
• Complexity
• Criticality
• Governance
• Duration
• Cost
• Statewide Impact
• Organizational Readiness
• Organizational Capacity
• Organizational Capability

The CA PMO provides resources from a range of classifications for project management and project support. The classification selected is based on a number of factors, including size, scope, and complexity of the work to be done. In general, assigned resources are from the following classification series: Data Processing Manager, Project Manager (IT), Information Systems Analyst, and Systems Software Specialist.

The CA PMO is committed to assist departments in identifying and meeting their project resource needs. For specific, short-term resource requirements, the CA PMO will work with the department to best meet their specific needs.

Engaged CA PMO resources report to the department project sponsor. They may also share status information with the CA PMO executive staff to assist the CA PMO management in anticipating additional resource needs, and for providing council and strategy direction in complex situations.

Yes, non-technology projects and resources may be a CA PMO service offering in the long-term (3-5 years). However, in the short-term (1-3 years), the CA PMO service offerings are in areas related to information technology.

The department can review the performance of assigned CA PMO resources at any time during the engagement period. At the start of an engagement, the department participates in the selection of the CA PMO resources. If, during the engagement, the department is unsatisfied with the performance of assigned resources, alternatives can be pursued which may include CA PMO providing additional training, and/or replacing or augmenting resources.

In most cases, the CA PMO resources are based at the department site full-time (100%) for the duration of the engagement.

Yes, for every reportable project, PAO engagement is a separate and distinct requirement, unrelated to a decision to engage the CA PMO. The CA PMO provides project management as a service without oversight authority. PAO is the State’s information technology oversight body, and to that end monitors state department project activities irrespective to CA PMO’s engagement on a project.

The CA PMO has no authority over the actions of the State’s information technology oversight body, PAO. As such, the CA PMO cannot comment on the likelihood of conditions that PAO may impose.

The CA PMO’s goal is to improve successful project outcomes by providing exceptional project management services through qualified, competent project resources. The CA PMO resources work as part of the client department’s team and will report to the project sponsor. Since the CA PMO does not have any control agency authority, the CA PMO is subject to all control agency policies and procedures, just like client department staff. Similarly, PAO will oversee the CA PMO’s performance related to project scope, schedule, and cost, just as it would oversee the performance of the client department staff in executing reportable aspects of a project.