Collaborating with purpose: UTM launches campus-wide Project Management Office

U of T Mississauga has launched a campus-wide Project Management Office (PMO), designed to work with the entire community on projects that realize the priorities of the Strategic Framework.

“UTM is a big campus with so many different parts,” says Vice-President and Principal Alexandra Gillespie. “How do we co-ordinate collaboration across teams and deliver results that help our students and community? How do we ensure those results reflect our values? And how do we do it efficiently, at a time when we have fewer resources on which to draw?” 

These questions informed PMO’s development over the past eight months, led by Anuar Rodrigues, UTM’s executive director of strategy. “We’re looking forward to the opportunity to help out on projects across the board—from student advising to program development for the health and applied sciences,” Rodrigues says. “We’re here for it all: to co-ordinate big projects that go beyond any one department and that will benefit from a consistent approach to planning and execution.” 

PMO organizes that approach around three kinds of service: enable, support, and deliver—or as Gillespie calls them, do it yourself, do it with help, and do it together. Depending on needs and preferences, UTM community members can manage their work themselves using PMO tools and templates, seek guidance on a project’s development from PMO staff, or ask PMO to assemble a project team and lead all aspects of project work. 

“We’re excited in each case,” says Rodrigues, “to share a UTM-wide methodology that manages projects consistently and that helps collaborators work together with purpose.” A case in point is UTM’s project to enhance supports in student advising, which the PMO will help lead. That work needs to draw on the experience of more than 16,500 students and of faculty and advisors across 18 departments and institutes. It involves collaboration with advising teams in the Registrar’s Office and with student support professionals in international education, career planning, well-being and student engagement. The PMO’s task is to bring these teams together with consistent goals, plans and processes: "to share a UTM-wide project management methodology," as Rodrigues says, reflecting on his own advising experience 20 years ago, when he first came to UTM as an international student from Belize, "that helps collaborators work together with purpose and deliver an experience for our students and community to flourish.”

That purpose opens a new way to put the vision of UTM’s Strategic Framework in practice. “That’s part of the reason why we founded PMO as a team in the Principal’s Office,” says Jennifer Reid-Burrell, PMO’s senior project officer. “We wanted to be intentional—to say, OK: these are the priorities the principal has set; here are the projects and project management tools needed to realize them.”

Their campus-wide mandate to advance UTM’s vision gives the PMO a wider scope than similar offices elsewhere, which often focus on one department or kind of work. This breadth will reduce UTM’s need to go outside the campus to hire external consulting firms. “Think of the difference for our efficiency and sustainability,” Rodrigues explains, “when we start to run even a few more projects in house—and when even more work for the UTM community is led by the UTM community.”

“Our scope is really energizing,” adds Reid-Burrell, who cites the opportunity to make a community-wide impact as her motivation for working at UTM. “We have the chance to support ambitious projects as a point of connection for different people and processes across campus.” 

Rodrigues hopes to strengthen these connections by organizing a community of practice in 2023, open to anyone at UTM who supports or has an interest in projects. It will host skill-sharing workshops, professional development opportunities and other events that give project managers—students included—another way to work, grow and find efficiencies together. 

“One part of UTM’s Strategic Framework always sticks with me,” Rodrigues says. “It asks, ‘Who can I work with to make things better?’ I hope the PMO can help answer that question—to connect different people across campus and provide project tools that let them work at their best.”