Why People Hate Your PMO

 

In 1415, King Henry V of England was leading an army through France, attempting to reclaim the territory he believed was rightfully his, being the descendant of William of Normandy, later William the Conqueror. Henry was confronted by a much larger French army near the village of Agincourt and, on the 25^th of October, the two armies came to battle.

When an army, in this case the French, confronts a significantly smaller force, the usual path to victory is to simply envelope the smaller force, forcing them to fight in every direction with no path to retreat. However, this tactic was denied the French, since the battlefield was in a long narrow field bounded on either side by thick forest. But even this did not seem problematic to them – they could simply throw more cavalry and infantry against the English front lines and overwhelm them that way. Unfortunately, the evening before saw torrential rains on the recently-plowed field. It was a sodden, muddy mess.

The typical man-at-arms of the period wore around 80 pounds of armor, either plate or chain-mail, and mounted knights wore far more. As the French advanced the approximately 300 yards, they became exhausted from trying to move forward in the muck. As soon as they came within range of the English longbowmen, they had to endure hundreds of iron-tipped arrows which could easily punch through most of their armor. By the time the remnants arrived at the front of the English lines they were easy marks for Henry’s men-at-arms who, wielding axes and maces, easily dispatched the exhausted French. One account maintains that a 5-foot-high wall of wounded, dead, and struggling Frenchmen lay just in front of the English position. By the end of the day Henry had won an astonishing victory.

Okay, Michael, you say, what does all of this have to do with the reason I clicked on this article, after having seen the title? What does this have to do with the Chief Financial Officer having a corner office, while the PMO personnel are lucky to not have to share cubicles? Well, I’ll tell you.

Back when the precepts of modern project management theory and practice were being codified, the United States Department of Defense was getting a little tired of major programs’ overruns and delays. They created the Cost/Schedule Control System Criterion, or C/SCSC. These guidelines for setting up baselines and generating cost and schedule performance reports were somewhat stringent; but, most of all, they were required of all contractors who wanted to do significant business with the DoD. You don’t want to “do” C/SCSC? Okay, fine, we’ll just take our mega contracts to your competitors, case closed. Generally speaking, this is no longer the case, what with the advances of the so-called graded approach and all. But at this time, “doing” PM was a rock-hard, inescapable requirement for doing business, much like observing Generally Accepted Accounting Practices is now.

The august managers who head up many of the PMOs currently cut their teeth on project management information systems and techniques during this period. It never occurred to them that parts of the macro organization would either silent veto attempts to advance a project management capability, or even resist them outright, until they found themselves in charge of the PMO and saw that exact reality unfold. For many, the fallback position was to engage in eat-your-peas style hectoring, which worked about as well as you would think. Some would resort to near-begging, with little better results. Project managers who did not want to have to engage proper PM techniques no longer had to, and those who wanted things to be different became very unpopular. Like the French at Agincourt, a major condition of the conflict had changed, and changed utterly. The ensuing reverses in applied PM tools and techniques has led directly to the type of management science caste system we see now, where accountants are somehow held to be far more valuable than Earned Value or Critical Path analysts, even though (as I have complained extensively in this blog) the general ledger can’t provide near the amount or quality of management information needed for an organization’s decision-makers that they claim. No, the answer to all of this, interestingly enough, comes from game theory, and is…

Oops! Out of space again. I will address the most appropriate technical approach to advancing the PMO’s mission in my next blog, assuming no accountants equipped with longbows get to me first.