Creating a stellar delivery organisation

 

At the Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit last month Donna Fitzgerald gave a presentation about the factors that go to support a stellar delivery organisation. That’s a fancy way of saying getting your project management maturity levels up so you have a better chance of project success every time.

The Gartner PPM maturity level model includes 5 levels of maturity but Donna said very few clients make it Level 5. “Life at Level 2,” she said, “is no longer good enough. Many organisations are facing the crash and burn. They are operating in a perfectly acceptable paradigm for yesterday.”

The jump for Level 2 to Level 3 is what Donna called ‘crossing the chasm’. It’s the difference between process controls, governance and management and balancing capabilities and delivering measurable business value. That is quite a leap.

Don’t project manage everything

One of my top takeaways from Donna’s presentation was the fact that you don’t need a project manager for everything. Too often I see little projects managed by project managers when the development team or a business team could have managed it perfectly well by themselves (and 10 years ago did exactly that). If you want to do more with the skilled project resources that you have, stop asking them to work on business as usual projects that other teams can handle. “For optimal project success you want the work done in less than 6 months and full time staff of 5 for a half-time project manager,” she said. Project management deals with the uncertain, risky and complicated, she concluded, so if your project isn’t like that, then it doesn’t need a project manager.

If you do have a half-time project manager on the team she recommended time boxing their commitment. It’s now commonly believed that multi-tasking is bad and that humans aren’t very good at switching between tasks. Therefore if you are scheduled to work 50% of your time on one project and 50% on another project, make it so. Work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning on one project and the rest of the week on the other. Don’t try to do both at the same time. A consulting firm wouldn’t expect someone to jump between assignments with an hour here, an hour there, she explained, so you can make fixed time allotments work.

I’m sure you can, but it’s going to be a mindset change for the workplaces I’ve experienced. Project queries and stakeholder phone calls don’t stop because it’s a Thursday.

Define ‘done’

“Done,” Donna said, “means the short list of things that define the business capability [being delivered by the project].” This is not the requirements document as that document is really a contract with an external supplier, she said. I would argue that it’s also often a document for internal supplier teams to work from and while you’re not likely to sue the team that sits on the other side of the office to you, there is a chance that you’ll use the requirements document as a basis to sue a vendor for failed delivery.

Define ‘done’ with your project team and sponsors so that you’ll know when you get there and you can work towards achieving that.

Don’t start without committed stakeholders

This was another major takeaway for me. Donna is ruthless! She said we shouldn’t start a project without committed stakeholders. She said that if they don’t turn up to the initial meetings (as sometimes happens) then don’t be afraid to ‘throw them under the bus’.

Say: “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise this was a bad time to start this project. We’ll reschedule.” And leave the meeting room or their office. Sometimes you’ll come across stakeholders who genuinely aren’t able to support the project right now and that’s OK. Reschedule project initiation for a time when they can commit. But sometimes people are just lazy or unclear on their responsibilities or happy to delegate everything to you and take no role in their project at all, and that’s where the bus comes in.

Make time to reflect

Part of delivering a stellar project organisation is knowing that things need tweaking. And with the stresses of managing projects it is unlikely that you, as a PMO Manager or even as a project manager thinking about your own project culture, have time to do that.

Make time was Donna’s recommendation. “Nothing ever gets fixed if you don’t realise it’s not working,” she said.

Book two afternoons per month to get away from your desk and think. Start with saying, where am I, where are we, what’s the health of my projects, what’s bothering me. Sometimes you can’t see patterns in behaviour because you are too close to them day-to-day so this gives you the opportunity to reflect and objectively assess what is going on.

She recommended we spend 20% of our time talking to sponsors and extended stakeholders as this is good for careers, and it’s what successful PMO Managers do. I don’t think I do that, but it’s certainly something I would like to focus on.

These were the top tips I took away from Donna’s very practical presentation. I hope they help you!

You can follow Donna Fitzgerald on Twitter @nimblepm.

I attended the Gartner Summit as a guest of Genius Project.