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 third 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.
When is the right time to set up a PMO?
Even when you know the right type of PMO that is required and for the right reason, sometimes the organisation just isn't ready for it. Getting value out of a PMO requires a certain level of maturity of organisational culture that will enable the organisation to optimise the benefits of a PMO.
The further up the value chain of a PMO you go, the higher the level of maturity demanded. A PjMO would demand the lowest level of maturity, through PgMO while PfMO would require a very project- driven organisation (the terms discussed in an earlier post). The only exception is where a PfMO identifies project maturity as a critical success factor to deliver a strategy where none currently exists - but that really leads to a very stressful dual tracked race to build a project organisation while trying to deliver projects/programmes against a running strategy timeline.
How do you know your organisation isn't ready?
Your organisation is not ready for a PjMO if
there is no one person willing to take ownership of a project.
a project is seen only as what one's department does, and not what would benefit the organisation.
Your organisation is not ready for a PgMO if
there is a lack of collaborative thinking for departments to work together towards a single strategic goal.
there is a greater focus on process and the technicalities of project delivery than the more imprecise people angle
Your organisation is not ready for a PfMO if there is no
single understanding of vision and values for the organisation to move forward in a aligned manner
management stability in the organisaton for a strategy to develop in a robust manner
Change management and maturity roadmap
Still, change management should be part of the project scope of setting up a PMO. Let's face it: a PMO is usually required because the existing process, structure and/or people are not felt to be capable of taking the organisation to its intended goal without one (a PMO). And any change to the process, structure and/or people would require change management practices and sensitivities to succeed.
One fundamental principle I had was that the processes and structures I had in place at any one time must be in line with the capacity of the organisation to execute it. As the organisation accepts the new process and structure, the process and structure then gets tweaked again to push the envelope that little bit further, but not that much until it becomes too much for the stakeholders to take in. This alignment is done using a maturity roadmap which consolidates the outcome from my stakeholders' analysis, critical success factors identificaton and PM tools launch plan.
The first would be familiar to most project managers, with a twist that I will discuss in a future post in this series. The second lists all the factors that will make a PMO successful (eg., presentation at executive meeting, identified liaison at key stakeholders, etc) with a plan to achieve each one. The third identifies issues that hinders a successful launch of each PM tool (eg., project charter, BRE, etc) with a plan to resolve those issues to the point that the tool can be used with reasonable expectation of success. Each plan of course have a timeline & person responsible and is tracked to completion/changed.
What makes maturity roadmaps difficult for some project managers to manage is its fluidity. By virtue of being in a change environment, and even as a change tool, a maturity roadmap need to be revisited constantly to take into account emerging risks and opportunities. How often: at least weekly in a conscious and structured manner; real-time in an informal manner. The list of action plans may not change all that often but you need that assurance that it is current and takes into account all the latest developments towards your goal.
So, is this the right time to implement a PMO in your organisation?
If you wish to continue the series, the next article is about Who.
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