Status! Status! Status!
From the PMO Bytes Blog
by Wai Mun Koo
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Does the situation below look familiar? Next time when you encounter similar situation, tell the person – "Go get a life!"
This is the moment where you realize that you really need a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tool. As a PMO manager, I used to spend a few days every month in the past to chase after my project managers for project status in order to compile the details into monthly report to be distributed out to the project sponsors and stakeholders. Doing this in Excel spreadsheet is a laborious job that anyone that has done it before will swear never to do it again. Fortunately, this torment only lasted for three months for me when we eventually implemented a PPM tool in the PMO to takeover the bulk of these monotonous tasks. However, this is not the end of the nightmare. Now, with the new PPM tool in place, instead of chasing the project managers for project status, I have to chase them to update their project status in the PPM tool. It seems like the vicious cycle has repeated itself...
Posted on: February 25, 2011 04:00 PM |
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Comments (5)
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Joe Caruso
Luthier| N/a
Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada
Agreed. I have worked in environments with and without PPM tools. WIthout, there is a small army of clerks doing copy and paste. When there are changes, you cross your fingers the changes make it in. At minimum, there have to be two people, a primary and a backup that are skilled in this. With the PPM tool, after entering my status, a Project Director in the EPMO would click on a button and a consolidated corporate Project Status Report would get produced. A thing of beauty.
Wai Mun Koo
PMO Director| Intergraph PP&M
Singapore, Singapore
Agree and good luck. For us, the ongoing challenge is still how to ensure the timeliness and accuracy of the project data in the PPM tool, something that we have been struggling on for months, if not years. Getting the project managers to update their project status in PPM tool on a daily basis is as difficult as getting the sales to update their opportunity details in the CRM tool. I guess we may get some good ideas from successful CRM tool implementations with respect to this problem we are facing.
Sunando Chaudhuri
Director - PMO & Governance| Modon
Dist: Burdwan, West Bengal, India
Great article, so theer are many like me who have had this challenge. I have had this for so long in my career where I was the SPOC or as I like calling it SPOF (failure) and literally had to struggle 12 hours a day chasing PMs and then copy-paste trying to overcome all delays by working late. We later introduced a tool and as Wai points out had the same problem asking the PMs to update in the tool. We though use RPM at the moment and in-spite of a lot of teething problems, we have managed to get it implemented. I though work at the moment in a client space and they still use a excel macro based template; so as a PM, I am just happy to fill up my template and pass it on; I am sure there are the PMO lot who are having the same problems trying to put them together. Its a never ending cycle...
Wai Mun Koo
PMO Director| Intergraph PP&M
Singapore, Singapore
Thanks Sunando. If the project managers find that they are spending more time in updating project status than managing the projects themselves, then the PMO managers will have a similar issue of realizing that they are spending more time chasing after project managers for status updates and compiling monthly reports than actually managing the PMO. Hopefully, the next generation of PPM tools will be able to address these pain points.
Precious Agoma
PMO Analyst| British Gas
London, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Sunando, I think this is where the PMO can actually add value. Why chase the already busy PM, when someone within the PMO can consololidate that information? I think the PMO should be well abreast with the delivery status of the individual projects, in that they don''t need the PM to make the updates.
On my Project, and as a PMO, I am up to speed with all that is going on. I speak with the Scrum masters, get the individual srum status, consolidate this information and run it by the PM involved to make sure they are happy and roll that info into a single programme view.
The trick is that I lead by example. If you want things done your way, you have to be seen doing it. Try this out on your project, and your PM will forever respect your PMO and do whatever it takes to be in your good book. Remember this guys already see the PMO as a waste of space, so to get some form of buy-in, we need to be seen to be adding value.
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