So here is my answer to the questions, "WHY WAS THE PMO MANAGER REPRIMANDED?"
But first, thanks so much to all of you who took a moment to provide your advice and perspectives. In this little cartoon, the executive asks the PMO what plans they might have to help with all of those informal projects. Now, if you are one of those people who believe informal projects are not "real" projects and that they should be called something else like "task work", then you do not need to read any further. But for the rest of us, here goes. Consider the following illustration:
This illustration depicts project management that exists throughout the organization in terms of two dimensions as represented by the X axis and the Y axis. Along the X axis we have a continuum of "Formal Project Management" and "Informal Project Management" and along the Y axis we have a continuum of "Scientific 'Plan Driven' Management" and "Complex Adaptive Systems" resulting in four quadrants that serve to depict fitness landscapes and show the distinct environments in which projects exist and are undertaken within just about every organization. I write about this at length in Chapter 10 - "Sustaining Value" of my book Business Driven Project Portfolio Management, so I will refrain from all of the details behind this picture and try my best to summarize the main point of this construct.
What many, not all, PMOs do today can be best described as the application of plan-driven project management in support of the formal projects of the governing organization for whom the PMO exists to serve. In the illustration above, this is the Simple Landscape shaded in pink. And for a new PMO or relatively young PMO, this is more than a full time endeavor. As the PMO fulfills its initial mandate, evolves, and matures, there are many opportunities that can be pursued in meeting the project-related needs of a company. Some may pursue formal maturity by way of OPM3 or P3M3 or the Gartner maturity model, all excellent models. Others may view PMO maturity more in business management terms and as the ability to understand and meet the business needs of a company for which the application of a PMO and of project management is merely the means to that end but not the end unto itself, also an excellent approach.
What many experts in PMO setup, management, and maturity like Sue Vowler, lead author of the P3O Guidance of the United Kingdom Office of Government Commerce (OGC), advocate is that once a PMO gets to a Level 3 of PMO maturity blended across the various knowledge domains, the vast majority of PMO maturity benefits have been achieved. Can a PMO seek to obtain a Maturity Level of 4 or 5? Sure. But the time and cost required to achieve the incremental benefit of further PMO maturity in terms of scientific plan-driven management techniques applied to the formal projects of the governing organization, for most (not all) companies is simply not competitive with other opportunities that the PMO could be pursuing. Enter the other "Fitness Landscapes" of the above Organizational Project Management illustration.
Let's take the right hand side of the illustration first. The above illustration is not meant to imply that the PMO has to "own, manage, control, and deliver" all of the business as usual (BAU) informal projects or that these projects should be managed by trained and certified project managers and found within the database of the formal PPM tool of the PMO. To the contrary. But can or should the PMO have some care and role to play in helping to ensure that those who have some kind of a BAU project effort to manage are able to successfully do it? Consider all of the BAU projects out there. Might there be real business value in affecting improvement in how they are managed and delivered? For most organizations the answer is yes. In fact, it is not too hard to estimate the value of improving informal project management.
But what is even more compelling is the fact that many PMOs are being asked by their leadership teams and the line of business executives for help with their BAU project mix, usually in the form of very high-level streamlined practices that can be accessed and used on demand, self-study learn when needed resources, and access to SMEs if needed and if available. Though such support would be an insignificant effort for most PMOs, the value to those BAU folks being supported with their BAU informal projects is anything but insignificant. A good start. And in addition to that good start of considering a strategy for BAU informal projects, most PMOs would be well served to consider a strategy for the emerging field of contemporary management referred to as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) of which Agile, as practiced by some in the software development community, is but one of the many colors of the CAS rainbow.
Just as other organizations (HR, Security, Finance, Legal, etc.) have a care and reach out to functional management to ensure the direct report employees of functional management gets things right, should not PMOs consider doing the same? Or at least have their eyes and ears open to the possibility, if and when driven by the needs of the business? So getting back to the original question of why the PMO manager in the cartoon was reprimanded, it was because he had a myopic view of project management and of the PMO, one that was limited to just one of the four landscapes in which projects exists in an organization.
As always, I hope this blog post stimulated some new or different thinking about the PMO and the tremendous value that PMOs and project management can be throughout an organization. So hope we hear and learn from others.
