How Should PMOs Speak to Leadership?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
I spend a lot of time talking to PMO leaders about how they can make a greater contribution to the success of their organizations. More often than not, that centers around helping them to shift their focus to enabling projects to be more successful in terms of the business outcomes that are achieved. To oversimplify, to shift PMOs away from enforcing process compliance and monitoring variances around cost, schedule and scope.
Instead, I encourage them to strengthen the ability of the project delivery environment to deliver projects that are aligned with business needs—customer-facing products and services that can profitably meet customer expectations; and internal solutions that drive improved operational performance. Those goals are fluid in a world that changes as fast as it does today, and that means PMOs must be able to support PMs and teams to be adaptive, embracing change and minimizing disruption.
Generally speaking, the PMOs I work with understand these concepts and want to apply them. But I am often then faced with one question from those PMO leaders: “How do I get my leadership to buy into this idea?” (or some variation that indicates a difficulty in gaining support).
I hate hearing that question, no matter how many hundreds of times it comes up, because I find it very difficult to answer. You might think that’s why it was asked in …
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"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." - Catherine Aird |
