What are benchmarks in project management?

Question

What do you mean by benchmarks in project management? Is it the act of comparing the performance of a certain project to the performance of similar past projects?

Who's responsible for setting the benchmarks in a company? Is it the project manager or the PMO? (I guess that it's the PMO as he typically owns the repository of projects in the company)

Answer 1

Benchmarks are figures of merit for the characteristics of projects or processes that are generally deemed as being successful.  The relevancy of those benchmarks to your project depends on the degree to which your project has common or similar objectives, customers, deliverables, and processes.  For Project Management benchmarking, a PMO would be a good place to retain, update and share that knowledge.  The Project Manager should be the one who determines the benchmark relevancy to the project and the one who uses that information to set objectives, establish metrics and lay out the plan and scedule.