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The enterprise approach to managing projects is a managerial philosophy based on the principle that company goals are achievable through a web of simultaneous projects that calls for a systemic approach and includes corporate strategy projects, operational improvement, and organizational transformation, as well as traditional development projects. The concept is based on the idea that prosperity depends on adding value to business, and that value is added by systematically implementing projects of all types across the enterprise.

In this book, we present a change process that begins at the bottom and concentrates on developing project management capabilities within one part of the organization, then later relying on a top-down approach to spread those capabilities organization-wide. Failure in implementing a project office is generally triggered by a combination of factors such as lack of top management support, underestimating the scope of organizational change necessary, lack of methodology for managing projects, insufficient efforts for developing competent project professionals, bad timing, and inadequate management of the change process.

Unlike Dante, however, you will need to enlist others to join you in the quest; no one can carry a project office alone. Many organizations have attempted to improve their abilities and project management over the last decade. Much of this attempt met with limited success. People were sent out to be trained as project managers, only to find that when they returned to the organization they were not allowed to perform in the way they were trained. As people and organizations discovered that the individual training approach was not leading to improvements, there arose a movement where a person or group of people in the organization were charged with, or charged up about, systematically improving project management practice across the entire organization, thus helping the organization to change to an enterprise project management system.