Excellent project management will definitely help you deliver your projects but do you just want to deliver projects or achieve your strategic goals. For that you, would need to manage your portfolio of projects as a portfolio. This series hopes to share my experience in portfolio management, what I did well and what I messed up in hope you can short-cut your learning.
Most of the time, a project to set up a PMO doesn't crash and burn. More often, though, it got mired into some slow-motion progress that does nobody any good. It delivered something that on paper seems to be what was designed but everyone else can see has morphed into a project police that proponents have promised to avoid. It has become just another group in the company with its own interest and stake in the organisation's projects to justify its existence, and not the enabler of projects.
There is no standard blueprint for building a PMO like there is for building a rocket. Building a PMO may be no rocket science and yet why do so many PMOs fail?
This is the sixth and last in a series sharing the reasons why the PMO didn't work. The first article may be necessary to provide the background while a guide to the types of PMOs is in the second article.
Change management
While I did mention that setting up a PMO is a project in its own right, the way it is run does not follow classical project management practices with its fixed scope & timelines and managing to minimise change to the scope & timelines. When setting up a PMO, change is a constant and it really is a question of how the change is managed and capitalised on.
The project to set up a PMO is a change management initiative. When executing a change management initiative, I normally think in terms of people, system and processes. These are the areas that change needs to happen to support the goal.
The areas of system and processes are rather straight forward for most PMO practitioners: system - project/programme management software; portfolio management software processes - project/programme lifecycle process/reports; project initiation process.
The area of people management is rather less obvious and would require further discussions here.
Collaborative culture
Whether you are setting up a PjMO, PgMO or a PfMO, you need some measure of a collaborative culture for a PMO to work - the difference between the different types of PMOs is just a question of degree.
For people to collaborate, they need to give up a bit of the autonomy that they currently have and vest it in the group or someone else they collaborate with. And for that to happen, they need to trust someone else who they believe has their interest at heart. And that someone could be the PMO and the PMO can do a lot to create such culture on the ground if it doesn't exist. How this is done would require another series of articles.
Shared strategic vision
This is required for a PfMO to work and this isn't something that is created from the top only. Yes, the executives need to speak with one voice and just as importantly, with one dictionary but, constant discussions with people on the ground will ensure that they not just only can recite the words of the strategic goal but also understand it in the way the CEO intended.
Project management career ladder
Any organisation reliant on projects to work would do well to have a project management career framework. There are various models, including having a career ladder; rotating project managers; regular/constant refreshing of the pool of project managers from outside. The practice of rotating management trainees into the PMO not only inculcate a project management mindset into the general management culture, but also serves to broaden the network you need to succeed. Oh, and don't sneer at the junior status of such management trainees - they not only open doors for you but can also feed you information needed for your role or to trade to get further information. Oh, Machiavelli me.
Communities of Practice
If not all project managers are under a single PMO and they almost always are not, then a community of project managers will certainly help provide support and shared experience among the brethren of project managers.
Maturity Roadmap
With a PMO set-up, it is counter-productive to implement the end result and expect the organisation to adapt to it. It may work with software implementation but not with people.
In a change initiative, the ground is constantly shifting and if you do not anchor it somewhere, it is easy to get overwhelmed. You could end up reacting to the latest development rather than anticipate and positioning yourself to manage the change. A maturity roadmap will provide that anchor with a baseline of initiatives based on the maturity of the organisation, current and anticipated, from that point in time. Just make sure the anchor is moveable.
A key principle I had when setting up the PMO was that the systems and the process I had in place must be in line with the capacity of the organisation to execute it. As the organisation learns to use the system and processes I have put in place, I will upgrade them a further step and then coach and facilitate the organisation to be able to execute them before upgrading them again. With a maturity roadmap, I am always in charge of that change.
The key difference between a maturity roadmap and a conventional WBS-based project plan is that the former is constantly changing, every day sometimes. Even the scope could change if the situation changes although the objective rarely does. If such changes happen with such regularity with a conventional project plan, one would think that the project manager's scheduling or change management (here used in the project management sense rather than a change initiative sense) skills are deficient.
Change architecture
Often a PMO is implemented as one of the many changes in the organisation. You can be quite sure that the prime mover of the PMO would have other ideas as well. Often also, these changes are implemented by different units within the organisation. These changes need to be coordinated using a Change Architecture, if the changes were not to conflict with each other.
In a way, it is a roadmap of roadmaps but there are also a practical aspect to it as well. For instance, there is often a capacity for change that a department may have and coordinating all change initiatives will ensure that a department is not pushed to change beyond its capacity. Also, there are sometimes some logical sequence that certain changes need to follow and a change architecture would help weave them together.
Stakeholder Management
As with any project and more so with a change initiative, stakeholder management is key to the success. The PMO sponsor and (sometimes) the PMO Head work on the executive level stakeholders while the PMO team works with operational level stakeholders.
So, how are you setting up your PMO?
Conclusion to the series
So, in summary:
Why are you setting up your PMO?
What kind of PMO did you want?
Who do you have running the PMO? When is the time right to set up the PMO? Where should you park the PMO?
How are you setting up the PMO?
Hope you now know who the five wives and one husband are.
I would appreciate any comments you would have on this series. Add to my learning as I hope I have added to yours.
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