I spent a meaningful portion of my career inside Samsung Telecommunications, where I led process improvement and project management initiatives across multiple business units. During that time, I earned five Best Practice Awards and three President's Awards, primarily for results delivered through the company's PMO discipline.
Here is what I want you to know: most of what made Samsung's PMO approach work was not exotic. It was discipline applied consistently. And almost all of it can be adapted by a small or mid-sized business — without buying enterprise software or hiring a specialized PMO team.
This article is for owners and operators of growing businesses who feel like their projects keep stalling, drifting, or failing to deliver what was promised. Below are the core practices I learned at Samsung, translated for the SMB scale.
Practice One: Every Project Has a Charter
At Samsung, no project moved past the planning stage without a written charter. The charter was short — usually one to two pages — and it answered five questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- What does success look like, in measurable terms?
- Who is the executive sponsor, and what authority does this project have?
- Who is on the team, and what does each person own?
- What is the timeline, and what are the major milestones?
This sounds basic. It is not. The number of times I have walked into an SMB and asked, "Who owns this project?" — and gotten three different answers from three different people in the same meeting — is too high to count.
If you cannot write a one-page charter for a project, you do not have a project. You have a hope.
Practice Two: A Real Sponsor With Real Authority
Every project at Samsung had a named executive sponsor. The sponsor was not ceremonial. The sponsor had three jobs:
- Make decisions when the project team was stuck
- Remove organizational obstacles
- Hold the project team accountable to the timeline and the deliverables
In SMBs, projects often fail because nobody at the leadership level owns them. The team works hard but keeps hitting walls — competing priorities, missing approvals, resource conflicts — and there is no one with the authority to break through. The project drifts. Eventually, it dies quietly.
The fix is simple: name a sponsor. Give them real authority. Hold them accountable. If the leadership team is not willing to do that, the project should not start.
Practice Three: Weekly Status Discipline
Every week, every project at Samsung produced a one-page status update. The format was the same every time:
- Status: Green, yellow, or red — with a sentence explaining why
- Accomplishments this week: What got done
- Plan next week: What's planned
- Risks and issues: What might prevent us from delivering on time
- Decisions needed: What we need from leadership
That last bullet is the one most SMBs skip. They send status updates that describe activity. They don't surface the decisions that need to be made. Then leadership is surprised when the project misses a deadline because of a decision that was waiting on someone for three weeks.
The status report is not a record of activity. It is a tool to drive decisions.
Practice Four: Phase Gates
Bigger projects at Samsung were broken into phases, with a formal gate review at the end of each phase. At the gate, the project team had to demonstrate that:
- The deliverables for the phase were complete
- The business case was still valid (the world hadn't changed)
- The team and resources for the next phase were ready
If any of those failed, the project did not move forward. Either it was paused, re-scoped, or killed.
This sounds bureaucratic. In practice, it is the opposite. It is what prevents projects from continuing on momentum after the original reason for the project no longer exists. SMBs frequently spend months on projects that should have been killed at the first phase gate — but there was no phase gate, so nobody noticed.
Practice Five: Lessons Learned (For Real)
Every project at Samsung concluded with a lessons-learned session. Critically, the output of that session was not a document that went into a folder. It was a list of specific changes to the standard playbooks, the templates, and the operating procedures.
If a project hit a problem with vendor selection, the vendor selection process got updated. If a project ran into trouble with cross-departmental handoffs, the handoff procedures got documented. The lesson didn't sit in a binder. It changed how the next project would be done.
Most SMBs skip this entirely. The project ends, everyone is exhausted, the team disbands, and six months later somebody else makes the exact same mistake. The pattern repeats every project. Nothing gets better.
How to Apply This in an SMB
You do not need an enterprise PMO to apply these practices. You need:
- A simple one-page charter template
- A simple weekly status template
- A leadership team willing to be sponsors with real authority
- A monthly project review where status, risks, and decisions are discussed
- A standing rule that lessons learned become updates to your playbooks, not files in a folder
That's it. Five things. None of them require software. All of them require discipline.
The companies that grow successfully are the ones that learn from every project. The companies that stall are the ones where every project starts from zero, every team makes the same mistakes, and the lessons are never institutionalized.
Which kind of company do you want to build?