Things Your PMO Is Doing Right

 

My long-time readers will recognize the title of this blog as a derivative of my first book, Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong (PMI Publishing, 2008). It’s easy to stand astride the struggling Project Management Office team members and kvetch about what they could be doing better, but that’s not how Peters and Waterman created their best-seller In Search of Excellence. Instead, they sought out successful organizations and queried what they thought they were doing right. In that vein, I had an opportunity to direct an extremely successful PMO, but it was successful because of the deviations I took from the nominal, staid approaches that my predecessors had taken. I’ve repeated this strategy on several occasions, and have never seen it fail. The following is a partial listing of the unusual tactics that went into it.

First off, the successful PMO Director will recognize that their main task is not to change behavior, or compel compliance with modern PM theory or practice. Without exception, every single failed (or failing) PMO Director thinks to the contrary, and will spend/has spent a great deal of energy towards those ends. This energy has been completely wasted. Even in those instances where the people involved tell you to your face that they recognize the value of what you are trying to do, and promise to support it, the pursuit of changing people’s behavior to any significant degree is a waste of time.

No, the successful PMO Director will realize from the get-go that their job is simply to put into the hands of the decision-makers the information they need to optimize their decisions in the project/program management realm. This job is simple, but it’s not easy, and it absolutely does not include eat-your-peas-style hectoring of the other members of the organization. They have their jobs to do already, and really don’t need any lectures about how they should be doing better.

Unfortunately, the ability to collect PM data, process that data into usable information, and deliver that information in a format that its consumers can readily understand has been turned, via formality of operations, from a relatively straight-forward task into a labyrinth of irreconcilable diktats, fraught with double-binds. The successful PMO Director recognizes this, and is able to jettison the superfluous elements that the “experts” expect of the PMO.

In order to advance this capability, the successful PMO Director will employ the following three tactics to any change in the business model:

• The new capability must be falling-off-a-log easy for the participants. Any capability advancement that depends on extensive training, re-training, or behavior modification on the part of the organization is doomed.
• In almost all instances, the actual systems being introduced will require the direct participation of only a subset of the target organization. For most PM applications, for example, beyond the PMO’s personnel there’s really only a need for Control Account Managers (CAMs) and/or Work Package Managers to help set up the baselines, and provide status once per month. However, if one of these people from whom you need participation opts out, you must respond immediately. Their non-participation cannot stand unchallenged, or else you may as well accept defeat in the here-and-now, rather than watch a slow, agonizing decline.
• When those from whom you require participation are actually participating, they’re golden, even if their data is marginal, or clearly contrived. Data can be improved – participation can’t.

I know, I know – these ideas are absolutely outside the mainstream. And yet, I’ve seen them work on multiple occasions, despite some highly formulaic and hackneyed objections, including:

• If you’re not “doing” (insert some aspect of PM here, such as risk management, quality, communications, whatever), then you’re not authentic.
• On the opposite side of the assertion in the previous bullet, anything you want changed from the existing status quo will be portrayed as an unacceptably onerous demand.
• Those managers who have gotten ahead based in some part on a lack of accountability for their actual cost or schedule performance will attempt to ruin you personally. How they go about this will vary from organization to organization – you just need to know they are out there, and will destroy you and your PMO as soon as they are able.

The successful PMO Director will navigate these difficulties, typically with these strategies:

• If you can’t out-and-out dismiss the element of PM that’s being held out as the missing piece of “authenticity,” then imply (don’t state) that that piece will be addressed once the basics are in-place. In most instances, once the basic cost/schedule information is made available and working, interest in the “missing” piece(s) will dissipate.
• As for the accusation that any change being wrought is onerous, refer back to the very first bullet in the first list. If you’ve included the falling-off-a-log-easy aspect to your implementation approach, this charge will be recognized as self-evidently absurd.
• The political assassination attempts do not readily lend themselves to a simply articulatable counter-strategy. However, there is hope. I actually addressed this prickly subject at length in my third book, a copy of which I’ve promised to the first person who uploads to the comment section a selfie of my checklist for seminar attendees from my April 2 blog while attending an actual PM seminar.

As for those who would say that, absent a notable change in the behavior of the organization, any claim from the PMO that it has advanced Project Management capability is specious, there’s a real irony at hand. As the basic, readily available cost and schedule performance information gets disseminated, even those project team members who have zero formal training in PM will start to discuss things like how to identify the causal factors behind their negative schedule variances, and the most appropriate uses of resources on tasks not on the critical path. They’ll start thinking about Project Management as they realize its capacity for improving their odds of project success, and in a way that force-feeding them the same precepts would have never accomplished.

And that, in my opinion, is how Project Management is done right.