PMI PMO Symposium® - Where Leaders Meet

 

Did you know that 2016 will be the fifth year that PMI is hosting the PMO Symposium? This event brings together PMO leaders and organizational executives to share insights and strategy for effective organizational project management (OPM). The event in 2015 brought together over 450 organizations and 500 plus PMO leaders from 30 different countries.

Focusing on the needs of PMO leaders and senior decision makers, PMO Symposium 2016 will take an in-depth look at benefits realization management and PMO actionable insights enabling PMOs to demonstrate value. In addition to informative breakout sessions, thought provoking keynotes, offsite learning excursions, the 2016 event will provide ample opportunities for knowledge hub small group discussion. Knowledge hub small group discussions are highly interactive, audience-driven sessions that enable attendees to share ideas, challenges and solutions with the help of a subject matter expert facilitator. An OPM theme is given to encourage and focus conversations. Come with a list of questions you want to ask other attendees and be prepared to share your own experiences and tips. Selected themes are repeated throughout the event to enable attendees to choose and participate in various time options with different facilitators.

Below are thoughts from speakers who will present at the 2016 event.

Keep it Real – Metrics for the Real-World

Catherine Tonne – Senior Director, Visa, Inc.

Why should senior professionals attend the PMI PMO Symposium? Well for several years I asked myself the same question. I have attended more PMI conferences than I can count – starting with San Francisco in 1988!!   I was a bit jaded to say the least. Then through various PMI activities I started talking with like-minded senior professionals and they enlightened me. The PMO Symposium by PMI is different. It focuses on seasoned PMO professionals and their needs. The topics are the most current trends, the idea and experience sharing and learnings between attendees is stellar. I attended my first Symposium in 2014 in Miami. I was thrilled with the outcome and am excited to attend this year’s event in San Diego. In fact, this year I am presenting a breakout session on PMO metrics, Keep it Real – Metrics for the Real World.

Ah, metrics! Very tough to develop sometimes but we cannot live without them. They enable PMO leaders to answer tough questions.  How to prioritize/rank the portfolio? What projects best enable the fulfillment of corporate strategic initiatives? Which projects should be funded or not? How to identify project complexity to determine optimal staffing and workload? Metrics can be very complicated and require all kinds of fancy tools and software to calculate – or they can be simple and super easy to use with a calculator or maybe Excel the only tools needed.

For my presentation, I will share practical, proven metrics for the real world that attendees will be able to use the day they get back to their offices. Metrics are pivotal for identifying and enabling delivery of projects with the highest return on investment and potentially improve one’s market positioning.

In addition to my metric presentation, I will also facilitate a knowledge hub small group discussion focusing on integrating agile methodology and the PMO. The discussion will focus on how PMOs can support agile teams and methodology and how PMOs can adapt to evolving needs of projects, teams and organizations.

I hope to see you at the PMO Symposium, in San Diego, 06 – 09 November, 2016.

Benefits Management in an Agile World

Matt Williams, HSI Associate

In a global economy characterized by rapid, sometimes unforeseen and disruptive change, organizations are forced to adapt quickly to mitigate the risks of such volatility. Just as importantly, change presents an opportunity to strengthen an organization. Examples include the implementation of new technology, lean techniques and, adopting new organizational structures that can consistently and efficiently deliver strategic business objectives.

The conventional role of project management has been to produce deliverables, for which proven processes, techniques and tools are in use. However, whilst most organizations recognize that projects are undertaken to deliver benefits and drive increased business value, the responsibility for doing so is not always well-defined and understood. Therefore, executive sponsors and project managers need to work collaboratively to ensure that project deliverables are deployed in a manner which produces benefits that align with business strategy. There is an increasing awareness that benefits realization needs to be an integral component of project management.

The use of an Agile management approach has been adapted to many non-IT applications and therefore has potential applicability across all organizational units, in a diverse range of industries in both the private and public sector.  Its use facilitates early and incremental delivery of business value, as opposed to all of the value being realized at the conclusion of the project, as is traditionally the case.

The use of Agile approach to the delivery of business value helps project managers to:

1. Identify opportunities to deliver value as early as possible in the project lifecycle
2. Review benefits delivery performance to date, relative to the forecast delivery identified in the business case
3. Analyse whether the initiative remains viable; and if additional investment may deliver a greater overall return or; if the funds being invested will produce a better ROI if redeployed to other initiatives

Join me on Wednesday, November 9 at my session at the PMO Symposium 2016 in San Diego, or my knowledge hub sessions November 7 and 8, where I will be discussing this topic in more detail.

Those that attend can expect the following takeaways:

1. Use Benefit Mapping techniques to identify and measure strategic contribution for all project initiatives
2. Identify and track Value Drivers to focus on the contributors of business value creation
3. Incremental Benefits Realization techniques

As an Associate at Human Systems International (HSI), I am a subject matter expert responsible for undertaking diagnostic assessments of organizational project management capability to produce actionable roadmaps of improvement initiatives. HSI holds over twenty years' data on the actual practices of leading project-based organizations - the world's largest database of its kind. HSI is a member of the PMI family.

PMO Symposium is a unique executive event for organizational leaders and those who direct an organization’s portfolio of projects, programs and initiatives. This 2016 PMI event will be in San Diego, 06 – 09 November, at the Hotel del Coronado.  Reserve your place among the world’s PMO leaders today.