Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.
The term “Organizational Project Management” or OPM (per Wikipedia, “the execution of an organization's strategies through projects by combining the systems of portfolio management, program management, and project management”) has been around since 1998, but the idea of driving the project assets of an organization using a top-down approach based on the strategies, goals and objectives of the organization has been around for decades longer than that.
How do I know that? I know that, because that is how I had my clients do it in the 1970s. It just seemed logical that you should put your capital where your objectives were. The question that puzzles me is, why would anyone commission projects (at least material ones) that weren’t tied directly to achieving the strategies and objectives of the organization?
Back then, these mid-sized organizations rarely had formal PMOs or portfolio management functions. Instead, the basket of projects to be accomplished was overseen by the COO or even the CEO. The statuses of these projects were a regular agenda topic at monthly management meetings. It was very hands-on, and thus very effective with very high success rates.
Somewhere along the way, as some organizations grew larger and larger and leadership committees became more abstract and esoteric in their thinking, it seems that the management of project assets fell to lower and lower levels of oversight—almost becoming a footnote in the business planning process (similar to IT until people started to wake up around the mid-1990s). This is evidenced by the lack of C-level Project Assets Management Officers (for lack of a better generic term) within organizations.
And like IT, even today CIOs that report directly to the CEO and are considered equal in stature as COOs and CFOs are a rare breed except in the largest of organizations. The reality is that virtually all major improvements to an organization’s ability to compete, grow and become more effective are driven by projects that eventually result in:
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It is only when these projects fail and have major impact on the organization’s bottom line that they seem to get the attention of the CEO (and often the media if the organization is big enough).
So why don’t all organizations, at least those with a backlog of projects, embrace OPM at least in principle? Could it be that for most organizations, especially mid-sized ones, leadership just doesn’t understand the world of project management like they do operations? Could it be, that like with IT, they are a bit intimidated by the complexity and disciplines that PMOs and portfolio management functions might impose on the organization?
Or maybe it is their distain to the noise levels that rise within an organization due to resistance to change that often accompany the pursuit of projects. Or perhaps they just don’t know how to do it, and it appears too complicated. Whatever the reasons, there seems to be much room for improving the way organizations approach the care and feeding of their project assets.
So what can organizations do to begin to integrate OPM concepts and practices into the fabric of their business planning and execution processes? To be sure, it isn’t going to happen by trying to sell management on creating large, overhead-generating and often bureaucratic organizations that require impressive investments and often fuzzy value propositions (like have been seen with so many Six Sigma Operational Excellence and PMO programs over the past decade or so).
Instead, I believe that introducing a top-down, business plan-driven approach to creating and deploying the project assets of an organization should be done in baby steps without much fanfare. In fact, in most cases, an aligned business plan approach to implementing OPM-like practices can be kept simple and allowed to evolve. Of course, if your organization has a mature and effective OPM approach in place, you will probably never reach this sentence in the article. But for those seeking improvements, here is some guidance you might find helpful:
Don’t try to sell the OPM idea or framework
The last thing management wants to hear is how they should be running the organization—and that includes adopting disciplines that may be foreign to them. This is why those trying to sell management on process improvement, PMOs and the like usually come away frustrated and unappreciated.
Evangelizing the organization usually falls flat. However, just doing those things (in this case, OPM-like things and building a history of success) usually gets the right kind of attention from management, as they want to know how you are doing it—and how much of what you are doing can be replicated throughout the organization.
If and when you are asked, then that is the time to say, “I owe it all to following OPM concepts and frameworks that are widely considered best practices when it comes to managing the organization’s project investments and assets.” Now the stage is set for getting heard by management and growing OPM within the organization’s culture.
With that in mind, here are some things you can start doing right away.
1. Become a student of the strategic direction of the organization and its goals and objectives—and what processes and areas of the organization need to change in order to support the achievement of those G&Os. If you really want to promote the evolution of OPM in your organization, take the first step and obtain a full and thorough understanding of the organization’s strategies, goals and objectives.
If possible, get that information from the business plan. Don’t be surprised if those G&Os seem to be lacking any clear measurements for success and don’t seem all that actionable. Don’t let that deter you. Using the G&Os as a starting point, rework them to contain operationally measurable and understandable terms. Change percentages to units. Identify which lines-of-business, cross-functional end-to-end business processes and departments will need to change and therefore be involved in contributing to achieving the G&Os.
You will most likely need to engage executives and rank-and-file people to get this done. The good news is that through this process, potential G&O-aligned initiative and projects will begin to emerge—ones that are easy to promote and get support for because they speak to achieving what is important to the organization.
Plus, you most likely will have identified key stakeholders that will support the project’s value. And all along, you never even had to mention OPM or try to educate anyone on its merits. You are letting your actions do the selling as you begin conditioning the organization and culture to think alignment, getting the right projects done, etc.
Consider this simple example on translating a G&O into more operationally meaningful terms. Assume that one of the organization’s goals is to organically grow net sales by 20% in the coming year (or $50 million) without having to scale the salesforce or operational overhead to match. Odds are that if you went to the sales force and order fulfilment folks with the organization for ideas on how to make this happen, you wouldn’t yield much.
However, if you translated the 20% into its dollars counterpart—and then into number of average sales—you would have something the sales force could chew on and the order fulfilment teams could understand in terms of its impact on order processing volumes and velocity. They could probably describe the hurdles and obstacles that would impede the effort.
From that information, you could formulate the issues, the end-to-end processes that would be impacted and other valuable implications that could become the foundation of one or more projects.
2. Build traceability back to the business plan’s G&Os into the project justification/business case and planning process. As the list of projects grows, be sure to maintain each project’s traceability back to the G&Os it supports. In fact, make it the focal point of the project’s justification within the business case and a constant test for each project’s deliverable.
When presenting overviews of the project to management, consider leading with the G&Os it supports, followed by how the effort will contribute to their achievement. Taking what was learned about achieving the above G&O example, it shouldn’t be a stretch to package up a set of projects that hold the promise of moving the organization towards\ achieving 20% in organic sales growth ($50 million or assume average sale is $2,500 so 20,000 orders a year) without major increases in operational costs.
You also can translate that achievement into a will-to-pay (how much the organization is willing to invest in the achievement of the G&O). This in turn can be compared with the estimated costs of the projects to determine if the project(s) are worthy of pursuit.
Imagine going to the leadership team and opening the discussion on the projects in question with:
“As part of achieving our goal to organically grow net sales by $50 million, we have identified four major projects that can be accomplished with this fiscal year that will streamline our sales fulfilment processes, creating the capacity to handle 5,000 orders more a month and increase the average number of orders per customer from three to right a year.”
Do you think you would have their attention? Trust me…you will. So be ready to back up your claim with a barrage of questions like, “How did you determine this?” “Who concurs with your assessment?” and “How certain are your numbers?”
3. Engage VPs and C-level executives to better understand their points of view related to obstacles and constraints related to achieving G&Os. If you want to make your efforts pay off even bigger, preview your project ideas to C-level executives and allow them to help shape the project. Be sure to ask them to identify the obstacles and constraints they believe might derail the efforts. Also, elicit their expectations and work them into the project’s scope as best you can.
Do all of this so that when presenting to the leadership team, the positive nods and endorsing glances are plentiful. CEOs love it when their team is supportive of change and advancement of the strategic direction of the organization. In short, make getting a “yes” as easy as possible.
4. Build G&O alignment scoring criteria into the portfolio management, project justification and post-project success assessment processes. Getting approval to pursue projects that support the G&Os of the organization is just the beginning. Every part of the project plan—from inception through post-deployment assessment of success—needs to be tied directly to the G&Os that gave it birth.
Creating a project scorecard that can be used to score a project for inclusion into the portfolio—and then used later when the project is deployed to measure the benefits realized—is critical. It is part of the success narrative that makes your approach credible to management, so much so that hopefully OPM evolves into existence without ever having to label it as such.
Getting management on board with OPM is a process that may take some time. Rarely can anyone overly wrapped up in the language of a discipline—be it technology, marketing or project management—can communicate on a business level to upper management effectively; CIOs have learned this over and over again. Management is much more likely to be open to change where the benefits have been demonstrated by competitors or from within. Often, subtle approaches like those outlined above can work to open management’s mind and checkbook.
How are projects identified in your organization? How many OPM concepts has your organization put into practice? What obstacles and constraints are keeping you from deploying an OPM model in your organization? You thoughts are welcome.
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If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? - Will Rogers |
