The Dreaded Project Accountability Avoidance Office

 

In last week’s blog, an alert GTIM Nation member added a comment that contained the following:

“Hence, many PMOs operate as a PAAC (Project Accountability Avoidance Office).[i]”

(Yes, the commenter subsequently addressed the fact that the Project Accountability Avoidance Office’s acronym is actually PAAO.)

This set my remaining active brain cells into overdrive, as I reflected on that sentence’s implications. In particular I remember reading about an interview question that went “Would you rather be part of an empire in its ascendency, or its decline?” Let’s set aside the sheer goofiness of this question actually being asked in an interview. Any thinking person would instantly recognize that the potential employer is going to prefer candidates that choose the former, and respond accordingly. But that question, I believe, points to one of the main implications of the term Project Accountability Avoidance Office, that I would articulate as “Project organizations begin with the goal of actually executing scope on-time, on-budget; however, over time, they tend to shift their overall focus on sustaining themselves as a PMO, collecting salaries and scolding internal opponents.” The movement over time from genuine PMO functions towards “Project Accountability Avoidance Office” purposes strikes me as a migration away from accomplishments outside the PMO (the macro-organization’s project portfolio) and towards the internal goals of self-perpetuation and well, to be blunt, influence peddling.

Recall the axiom “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.” Originally attributed to Tacitus[ii], derivatives include “Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.” What would lead the nominal PMO to seek to engage in accountability avoidance, then? Would it not be … failure? Failure to bring Projects in on-time, on-budget? Rather than continue asking rhetorical questions, let me just drop this unattractive truth on the conference room table: when the project portfolio performs poorly in cost and schedule space, the whole reason for having a PMO in the first place comes into play. If such a PMO is already in sustaining-themselves mode, their tactics will become more and more off-putting, as they will attempt to justify their existence through narratives that are divorced from actual performance, and more along the lines of the eat-your-peas-style hectoring that I often decry in this blog.

And here is where a cruel irony of the Project versus Asset Management struggle manifests. There is no Return on Investment (ROI) without happy clients, which, in turn, doesn’t happen without effective PM. But, once those clients are being confronted by overruns and delays, the litmus test that will be used to overhaul (or even dismantle altogether) the PMO will be the ROI.

So, how does the PMO Director keep from crossing the line between legit PMO and the downward slope towards PAAO? For this I want to turn to one of the four Maccoby archetypes, the Company Man.

Quick refresher for recent GTIM Nation additions: the brilliant Michael Maccoby wrote a book entitled The Gamesman; The New Corporate Leaders (Simon and Schuster, 1976), in which he posits four worker archetypes:

• The Craftsman doesn’t really care for whom he works, but does care about the quality of his output.
• The Company Man tends to assume the persona of the team around him.
• The Jungle Fighter gets ahead through calumny and deception, clinging on to victors and distancing themselves from losers.
• The Gamesman doesn’t see his salary or other benefits as a roof-over-the-head, or food on the table. Rather, he sees his renumeration as some kind of token in a grand game he’s playing. Because of this he is both more likely to have attained a mastery of the “rules” of this “game,” while being more willing to take risks.

The canary in the PMO-to-PAAO path coal mine is going to be the Company Man. Craftsman and Gamesman will feel right at home in the legit PMO, Jungle Fighters in the PAAO, and each will feel out-of-place in the opposite environ. What are your Company Men doing? Remember that they tend to take on the persona of the organization around them, in this case, the PMO. Are they directly involved in advancing PM capability within the organization? Or are they attempting to distance themselves from failing/failed Projects, Jungle Fighter-style?

If the latter, there’s at least a possibility that your PMO is starting to turn into a PAAO.

Three strategies will help avoiding that path: (1) keep your PMO lean, spending only on the things that actually improve Project performance, (2) base assessments of PMO value on actual portfolio cost/schedule performance – no appeals to what others hold to be “proper” management techniques, and (3) keep reading this blog.

[i] Freeman, George, from the comments section of the Game Theory In Management Blog, posted 16 April 2024.

[ii] Retrieved from https://dailystoic.com/success-many-friends-failure-orphan/ on 20 April 2024, 19:47 MDT.