The PMOs' Enemies

 

It’s not pleasant to think that your organization, which, perhaps, set up its Project Management Office with much fanfare and enthusiasm and put you at its head, may be harboring those who are not only reluctant to help you succeed, but are determined to frustrate your goals, techniques, and advancement, and actively desire your failure. But it is true, and the sooner you and your team understand that, the better your chances of advancing. Typically, the PMO has two major enemies, and I will address them in reverse order of the threat they represent.

The first class of enemies the PMO team must be aware of is the Accountants. Yeah, yeah, I know, they come across as benign number-crunchers, but, generally speaking, they are anything but, and to understand why we must articulate the specific mission of the Project Management Office. The PMO exists for one reason above all: to put into the hands of decision-makers the information they need about project performance. If there was an Harry Potter-like spell that could magically deliver this information (“Projecto Performi Educationo!” perhaps), then all of that effort your team puts into setting up work breakdown structures, cost baselines, schedule logic, and then collecting costs and status – it would all be moot (I didn’t include risk management, ‘cuz it’s already a waste of time). So, it follows that you as PMO lead are the advocate for an information stream, and an extremely valuable one at that. Knowledge of which projects are performing better than others has huge implications, ranging from an early tip-off of when a project is going off the rails, to which proposals your organization should be pursuing or ignoring, all the way to whom among the management team are performers, and who, well, isn’t. In any organization, information is power, and this type of information is to management what Sith lightning is to dark Jedi masters acquiring political status. It is virtually indispensable, to those who recognize it for what it is.

Ah, there’s the rub. So much of management “science” has been dominated by the asset managers’ (read: accountants’) narrative that there are many organizations, large and small, where the project management-types don’t even have a place at the discussion table. But you just know that at these companies, the head of the finance and accounting has a place at the table, and probably near the head. These people are convinced that any piece of management information that has a currency sign in front of it must come from the general ledger. When the PM-types start demonstrating the power of even an elementary Earned Value Management System, this makes the asset managers very nervous, or even apoplectic. The asset managers’ narrative cannot survive the alternate memes, that their own information stream is but one of three needed for true portfolio management (what are the other two? Click here). And they’re not going to sit back and have that narrative impinge upon the perceived efficacy of their own information stream. They will strike back, either by minimizing the power of the PMO’s information stream(s), or by maximizing the perceived power of the general ledger to do things like, say, generate a reasonable estimate at completion (EAC), which it utterly can’t. In short, the CFO is not your friend.

Enemy number two is more insidious, because it’s more stealthy, even while it’s under our very noses. Consider the Project Management Institute® (don’t get ahead of me here – they’re not the enemy, they are enablers). The PMBOK Guide® is divided into nine sections: Scope, Cost, Schedule, Risk, Communication, Human Resources, Quality, Procurement, and Integration. And yet, none of these sections addresses the limits to the efficacy of their advocated information streams (or parts of the streams). It’s as if nine authors (or, if I know PMI®, committees of authors and editors) were given nine different-colored crayons and a coloring book, and told which parts they should color. The result was that none respected their epistemological lines, attempting to color the whole, and no one would call them on it. I don’t mean to pick on PMI® here – virtually all of the organizations that set themselves up as standard-bearers for project management “science” end up becoming inadvertent vehicles for charlatans and hucksters, pushing their narratives in order to maximize their own particular perceived value, while muddying the waters of legitimate management science scholarship. The director of the PMO becomes the victim of the overreach of PM advocates everywhere, and they are everywhere.

As Pogo said so many years ago, we have met the enemy, and he is us.