Double Hat Disaster: The Dangers of Delivery Leads Also Serving as PMO Leads

Kevin P Korterud is an Associate Director in Accenture’s Delivery Excelleence practice and currently serves as a as a subject matter expert in the areas of high performance Project, Program and Agile Product Delivery. In addition, he serves as a thought leader in harmonizing Waterfall/Agile delivery as well as in the design, build and implementation of Enterprise, Transformation and Program PMOs.

  PMO  

In many of my post for Voices on Project Management, I mention “back in the day” how simple and linear project delivery was then; small teams, a limited number of roles and a nearly complete focus on automating manual processes with technology.

A project manager could also double as a designer, programmer or other roles needed to complete project delivery. The level of work effort required for delivery enablement and support was quite modest.

Fast forward to today’s project, program and product delivery environment, and what was a simple organizational construct now has a level of complexity never imagined “back in the day.” Not only does the delivery work need to be completed, there are numerous enabling and governing processes that have to be executed in concert; tools, methods, status reporting, compliance assessments…the list goes on and on. 

What was single projects has become integrated program and product delivery at a level of exponential scale that was unheard of “back in the day.” This complex delivery environment has helped foster the creation of delivery program/product offices, typically known by the abbreviation PMO.

Through this division of labor, project, program and product PMO offices serve as an enabling layer of delivery capability and assurance disciplines that allow delivery teams to execute…

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