Your PMO – Servant, or Master?

 

A few years ago I gave a keynote at an Earned Value Management-themed conference, where I used the example of the Battle of Agincourt to point out how the landscape for launching or maintaining a successful PMO had changed, and the PM community had better recognize the nature of those changes before our brand loses virtually all of its value.

For those of you who may not be that into English history, the Battle of Agincourt occurred on Friday, October 25^th 1415, and was fought between French forces led by Constable Charles D’Albret, and vastly outnumbered English forces led by Henry V. Henry was attempting to escape with around 6,000 men to the stronghold at Calais when he was intercepted by as many as 36,000 French near the town of Agincourt. With the martial technology available to each side roughly equal, being outnumbered six-to-one would normally be an automatic death sentence. The numerically superior French could simply out-flank and surround the English and cut them to pieces, similar to the tactics employed by Hannibal at Cannae. But two things had changed in the run-up to battle, and D’Albret failed to recognize their implications.

First, the battlefield was a freshly-ploughed meadow in between two thickly-wooded areas. There was simply no way to encircle the English forces, especially with the French cavalry. If the English were to be brought to battle, they would have to be confronted head-on, down the corridor flanked by the woods.

Secondly, it rained heavily the night before, leaving the field a muddy morass. The typical French knight carried upwards of 80 lbs. of armor into battle, and their horses would be even more heavily armored. By the time the French forces had traversed the approximately 100-yard distance to the English lines, they were exhausted, and still struggling through the muck. They would prove to be easy pickings for the lightly-armed English infantry, who could simply hatchet them to death as they struggled in the mud. By the time the battle was a few hours old, there was a wall of struggling, bleeding, and dying Frenchmen in front of the English lines. Before the day was out, Henry had won an astonishing victory.

What does all of this have to do with Project Management Offices, you ask? Well, two things have changed since the halcyon days of mandated project management capabilities, and I’m convinced that most executives have failed to recognize the implications.

First of all, the ability to demonstrate an advanced project management capability, for the most part, is no longer required of organizations performing project work for the Federal (U.S.) government, nor of virtually anyone else. I believe the main reason that PM requirements arose in the first place has to do with the dual nature of Earned Value and Critical Path method-based information systems. Their first function is to provide valuable cost and schedule performance information to decision-makers. Their second (and far more stringent) function is to generate a narrative of what happened on the project, how it happened, and who made the key decisions. PM information systems create a sort of audit trail, so that errors can be traced back to their origins. It is this second aspect of PM information systems that makes them fairly unpopular with project teams.

Secondly, since the PM capability is no longer required, the implementation approach can’t be top-down, or retain elements of attempting to leverage organizational power to compel the PM capability’s advancement. In short, the directors of Project Management Offices are no longer in the position of enforcers of requirements, but must instead become marketers of information streams to decision-making customers.

So, what’s the acid test to determine if your PMO presents as an enforcer of policy, or a source of valuable information? It’s essentially this: does your PMO behave as a master of the organization’s project teams, or their servant? It’s an important distinction, because the latter can access many more opportunities for success, whereas the former is in danger of becoming a figurative mass of struggling belligerents, just asking to be eliminated from the management arena.