Getting People to Love Your PMO

 

Last week I “ran out of space” just as I was getting ready to reveal how to get people to stop hating your PMO. As I stated, the answer comes from Game Theory. I go through the complete analysis in my must-have books Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong and Game Theory in Management, but I’ll offer up the simplistic version(s) here.

As I pointed out last week, one of the major reasons people tend to dislike Project Management Offices is because they tend to be headed by managers who do not understand that it’s impossible to leverage organizational power to compel an advancement in a capability. Put another way, even if you are these people’s organizational superiors, you really can’t make them “do” project management. Yes, yes, I know you’ve been told you can by your superiors, and you have had individual successes previously doing just that, especially if you have been in the military. But it’s undeniably true, even though the attempts take a variety of forms.

One of the silliest such attempts involves the writing of a procedure that requires people to participate in creating baselines and providing status, and then getting the organization’s executives to sign/endorse such procedures, followed by plopping copies of the new procedures on the desks of those from whom you need participation to make your new systems work. Here’s an intellectual exercise: four weeks after the procedures hit everyone’s desks, drop by the offices unannounced, and look where the procedure is located. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it’s on a bookshelf, or buried beneath other documents (maybe even the quality and risk procedures, heh heh, heh). I provide more extensive analysis of tactics that don’t work in my first book, but, for now, suffice to say that you can’t compel the advancement of a capability.

Interestingly enough, the quality that’s needed for a successful implementation from the PMO team, and especially its leaders, is absolute gold, but perhaps even rarer. It’s humility.

Let’s momentarily examine the opposite quality, arrogance. Besides being highly off-putting in inter-personal relationships, arrogance also carries an opiate that prevents its carriers from being able to recognize when they have committed an error.  I have seen this time and again, where a newly-minted PMP® or CCE®, having studied hard and exerted great effort to get their certifications, automatically think they can not be wrong in asserting anything that ought to occur in project management space. I don’t mean to pick on the certification-granting organizations here – advanced degrees, being involved in large, high-profile successful projects, or even an absurdly inflated opinion of the self, all can lead to the same crippling frame of mind. And once that sets in, the PMO’s chances of success have all but evaporated. The project teams your PMO is supposedly providing a service to now perceive that you seek to be their masters, or, at the very least, highly irksome, know-it-all kibitzers, best left out of the decision-making process.

However, the humble PMO knows it exists to generate an information stream for the benefit of the decision-makers in the organization. This information stream doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult, but it does have to be accurate and timely. If the information stream thus provided is either of the former, and neither of the latter, that’s on YOU, Mr. or Mrs. PMO director, NOT on the macro organization around you.

Most writers will often begin their careers with a set of ideas they feel they need to get off of their chests. Successful writers will soon encounter a transition where, instead of expressing themselves for the cathartic value of doing so, they will seek to provide what their writers want to read. Similarly, virtually all PMOs begin life with an idea that they will be the mechanism by which the macro organization advances in its project management capability. The successful ones will quickly undergo a transformation, where they realize their contribution is maximized when they provide accurate, timely, and (most of all) relevant information streams to the organizations’ decision-makers, and do so as unobtrusively as possible. Once the organization’s decision-makers realize the benefit of having ready access to the information they need to make the best choices on a regular basis, they will also realize that they won’t be able to function at their new, higher level without the PMO’s input.

At that moment, your PMO will be loved.