Exploit Crisis for Targeted PMO Improvements

 

This month we are talking about improving the PMO. There's a lot of opportunity here, but generally new PMO services will have to be built in an evolutionary fashion rather than a revolutionary fashion.

This is especially true if the PMO is at a maturity level where it provides guidance and best practices to the organization it serves. It cannot garner much respect at this point because it will not be seen to have much impact on results. How does such a PMO grow into a more valuable group?

By coming to the rescue in a crisis.

It is better in this case to wait until the time is right, when a problem is hurting a large number of stakeholders and a consensus can be attained for a particular improvement.

Here's how this can be achieved. Assume project managers and stakeholders are complaining in the hallways about how they are frustrated with the chaotic environment. They say that too many projects are using resources at once. Now tollgates are coming up for many projects and the problem is magnified with the same resources scrambling to ensure each project is prepared for review. You can see that stakeholders, some of whom have resources prepping for the tollgates and some of whom are leaders of business units that will suffer from any delays, are in agreement that there is a problem.

What you have here is a crisis that can be exploited for targeted improvement. This is the time when the lowly PMO can step in with specific solutions that will satisfy a broad spectrum of stakeholders. But you have to be ready in advance!

This is not all that difficult. If you are in the PMO, then you have probably looked ahead many times and anticipated what problems are going to happen when. You may even know of business cycles or release cycles that generate periodic crises. The tactics to use to be ready and to execute the targeted improvement are more clear using the example of the tollgate traffic jam.

I'll post the tactics and steps in a couple of days.

Until then, consider these questions:

• Are PMO changes better effected as evolutionary or revolutionary changes?
• Can a lowly PMO that serves mainly as a source of guidance and best practices see into the future and anticipate crises?