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 aims to share my experience in portfolio management, what I did well and what I messed up in hope you can short-cut your learning.
Setting up a PMO is often, ironically, a failed project in many organisations. An experiment that didn't work. And it didn't work not because it was done wrongly, but because it was a lousy idea. But was it?
Most of the time, a project to set up a PMO doesn't crash and burn. More often, 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 of people 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 first in a series sharing the reasons why the PMO didn't work.
Why did they want a PMO?
When I set up my first PMO, I went around in circles for a few months until I went up to my boss and asked to speak to the person whose idea brought me in in the first place. "Perhaps", I mused, "I can tease out some of his or her idea why the PMO was envisioned in the first place and anchor that in what I do." His answer floored me: "I don't know who that is."
That was when I knew I was just a box-ticking exercise. I still delivered the PMO but by acting as my own project sponsor in addition to being my own project manager. Never an ideal but it helped deliver the PMO.
Do you know why your PMO was set up in the first place? Do you know whose idea was it? Do you know what sparked off the idea?
Bad reasons for wanting a PMO
Portfolio managers would put project proposals founded on bad reasons on the slow burner. But sometimes bad reasons doesn't mean you abandon the idea then and there, especially when it regards the PMO - your bread & butter/rice bowl/naan basket. Good portfolio managers would rearticulate the proposal and the project scope into something that would bring value to the organisation.
If you come across any of the following reasons, you would need to think very carefully how to shift the instructions you received into something less disastrous.
A box-ticking exercise, like my experience above - this means that the bosses have no idea why they need a PMO. Which means you write your own JD; you write your own project scope; you write your own PMO terms of reference. And so, you write them in accordance with best practice. And get the bosses to sign off on them (if you able to and there is no governance issue with it, back-date the sign-off to the original date when the proposal got approved) so that it looks like they were the clever ones all along.
There was this huge project failure with wide-spread implications for the company and the bosses said to make sure it never happens again. As a result, processes were tightened up and more layers of review were established. The problem is that the proportion of projects with such a high level of impact is normally very small but the controls to minimise the risk to such high-risk projects were applied to all projects regardless of risk level and impact. This brings almost all projects to a grinding halt. The scramble to by-pass the controls to get their projects going (normally by thumping the table harder than the next person or by taking it directly to the CEO) ends up shredding any residue of respect anyone could have for the much-hated controls and procedures. In audit-speak, the cost of controls (of having to get so many signatures and jumping over so many hurdles) outweighs the benefits of the controls (the NPV of the smaller or lower-risk projects).
The previous CEO wanted it but no-one knows why or what a PMO was meant to do. Really? Someone once looked me in the eye when discussing a CEO-inspired project, and said, "Jim, the average tenure of a CEO is 33 months." And he was right: the normal contract period for a CEO is 3 years; but the average is a little less because some CEOs had to leave before the term is up. The next CEO has no interest in continuity as it would then raise the question of why change CEOs in the first place.
Were you sold or did you buy?
There are many consultants today selling PMOs, myself included. And I can tell you the slides all look wonderful. The benefits are all very compelling and far outweighs the cost of setting up a PMO, including the cost of the consultants themselves. Some consultants seem to know what they were talking about and even identify the various roadblocks to the vision - inertia against change, self-interest groups, cultural issues, etc.
The problem is that no-one told the executive during the sales meeting that he or she is the one who has to break the self-interest, or take the lead in the cultural change. Also, no one made clear that the PMO can only recommend and the executive is the one who makes the decisions, requiring even more judgement when faced with the trade-offs between two finely-balanced competing options. A PMO process makes fudging more apparent.
While I do not believe that knowing any of the above (and many other factors) would obviate the case for a PMO, finding out problems later in the project normally lead to a stern, "We went into this on your recommendation. So, what do you want us to do now?" Success has many fathers, Failure is an orphan.
How clear is the vision?
CEOs are very busy people and have no time to word their vision in detail (except for their pet project, where they can even tell you the WBS - well, only the more critical ones, you will have to fill in the more boring ones yourself). That is why they surround themselves with clever people who understand what they meant in three sentences and are able to formulate an entire annual plan based on those three sentences.
The trouble is someone along the line turned out to be not as clever as was thought (who was that I wonder). The result is a massive expectation gap and a project that can only move after a meeting with the CEO, where you will be told, "I don't need all these experts as all I want is very simple - let me tell you what to do." How many times have we heard that? But then again, how many of us work towards the letter of the instructions that were given rather than the intent behind those words? Sometimes, we only have ourselves to blame.
Are the articulated objectives agreed in thought or only in words?
So, you got the whole executive table to agree on the PMO Charter and the Project Initiation Process. But did they all agree on the same thing? Funny how people can see and hear the same thing at the same meeting and walk away with different understanding of what they all saw and heard.
Part of the problem is that different people has different starting points. It often starts with the perception of the problem. Normally, the problem is because "Department X did not ....", X being not the department of the person speaking. Sometimes, the problem can be even more fundamental: famously when IT engineers insist that projects have been successfully delivered but "it was just that the users didn't want to launch." - so, there is no problem.
Sometimes, it is the scope of the problem. Some executives with clout may have 'alternative procedures', which involves one-on-one closed-door meeting with the CEO, where everything is approved and then, finance (or whoever else) is then informed. If the message is not pitched right, there could be a perception that the PMO scope does not include such projects (and any more new ones from that executive's office) because "it has been working so well all this while."
I think at least some of these scenarios will ring a bell with some disappointed PMOers. In the following five posts in this series, I will introduce you to the rest of the wives and the husband as well (if you haven't come across this term, I will explain in the final post). In another series, I hope to share with you the tricks of the trade that worked for me.
So, do you have the right reasons for setting up a PMO?
If you wish to continue the series, the next article is about What.
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