Eye on the Workforce

OK, the last post was a cliff-hanger. You are in the middle of a crisis! But it is an opportunity to add a new PMO responsibility - as long as you are careful.

Recall that the problem is that uncontrolled projects are heading to tollgates at a similar time causing conflicts with resources and schedules. Your immature PMO does not currently control tollgate scheduling.

Use these tactics to seize this opportunity:

Create the rules and steps to resolve immediate problems only. For example, if many tollgates are scheduled around the same time in the near future, the PMO should not try to boil the ocean by putting in place a tollgate schedule and process for the rest of the year. Instead, the solution should be resolving the immediate backlog with the participation of stakeholders and leaders.

Specifically, get agreement from stakeholders on ways to prioritize projects and ideas for acceptable scheduling strategies. Use these agreements and ideas to create your plan to resolve the immediate problem.

Socialize and seek approval for plan, but, because the problem is immediate and you want show that you are responsive, assume you will get approval and start to implement the solution right away. The PMO can prioritize and create a tollgate schedule consistent with the plan, making adjustments as feedback warrants.

Once the PMO has approval to implement some prioritizing and scheduling solution, execute to the plan. Remember to document how it works and how it can be improved.

As soon as the backlog of tollgates has been dealt with and the previous frustrations are still fresh in the minds of stakeholders and leaders, it will be the perfect time to suggest that the PMO continue to manage tollgate schedules "so we don't have to go through that again." And guess what, you just happen to have a process agreed to by stakeholders previously, with some improvements based on learnings from actually following the "pilot" version of the process. You also showed that you were responsive to the needs for projects to maintain progress.

That's the way to build trust and responsibility during a crisis. If your PMO typically acts only as a source of best practices, there are numerous situations where you can use the same tactics to build areas of responsibility. You just need to identify an appropriate crisis or conflict point and be ready to react. You probably already know the pain points. Have solutions standing by and be ready to swoop in for a fast resolution to build respect for your capabilities.

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?

If you are like me, you spend some time making sure you don't make people around you angry. You get expected reports out on time, you strive to deliver on time at the expected quality, you don't ignore your budget, you try to work collaboratively with stakeholders, you don't sneeze without covering your mouth. Likewise, if they are angry you try not to interact with them until later.

And when you want to motivate someone to act, you commonly use fear. You say things like: "If your team doesn't complete this work on time, it will lead to a significant budget overrun." "We'll never meet the deadline if we don't get additional resources."

So if you wanted someone you work with to want something more and work harder to get it, would you make them fearful or angry?

New research tells us that it is better to make people angry if we want them to want something in particular. Specifically, people who were shown a picture of an angry face desired objects more and exerted more energy to obtain those objects.

So consider using anger as a motivator rather than fear.

For example, when you are talking to the individual who can approve needed resources: "The shared resource we thought would be available will not be available. We requested the resource far in advance, so I do not blame you if you are mad. Let's get a contingent worker to finish of this work so that we can stay on schedule."

Or

"Other project managers I have spoken to do not think we can get requirements and design completed fast enough to start development on time. They think it is too complex for this team. I hope that makes you feel as angry as it does me. Let's show the doubters what we can do."

A little anger may go a long way.

• Band together with others in your organization who are experiencing the same workforce issues, be it need for more workers, particular expertise, or a re-look at who gets shared resources.
• Specify the urgency of the problem. Urgency is a good motivator to action. Your workforce issue can be urgent because your project cannot be completed on time or that, once implemented, it cannot be utilized properly to gain the business benefits projected at the beginning. It can even be that your workforce issue may keep you from obtaining the necessary stakeholder input for a successfully accepted project.

• Inadequate staffing in your project may result in legal problems later due to defects or problems with controls provided by software.
• Shared resources prioritizing projects other than yours may make complying with laws more difficult or impossible.
• Lack of expertise and slow hiring may make cyber risk more likely. Here's a struggle that we will all continue to experience: We are asked to get results through people, but organizational barriers to doing so keep getting in our way.

Here's a struggle that we will all continue to experience: We are asked to get results through people, but organizational barriers to doing so keep getting in our way.  

This month's topic is Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and before it gets away from us, I want to make sure you do not inadvertantly promote confusion about a particular deliverable.

In a project to deliver PPM for the first time, there is a deliverable that you cannot confuse in your WBS. It is related to communication, but you don't want to get it mixed up with the Communication Plan developed with the Project Management Plan. The communication deliverable for your PPM project is the "dashboard" or other display of the status and health of the projects being managed.

In your WBS, don't call activities to create this dashboard anything like the "communication plan." Use the deliverable name, such as Portfolio Dashboard, if you know it, otherwise just use a working title like they do in the movies. "Project Status Display" for example. Separate them geographically as well, keeping the dashboard activities away from project management tasks and into project deliverables design and development teritory.

While we're thinking about this dashboard, we might as well develop more WBS activities. Start with these three activities:

Identify sources of information (data) for status and health of projects covered in the scope of your PPM project. Among these are financial reports, some of which may be new. There will also be schedule and resource information, from a variety of sources.

Identify the roles that will create the dashboard that will go into production immediately upon project delivery. This first phase may be a subset of what is planned eventually, but make sure there are enough resources to handle the load into the near future.

Determine if hiring is needed because of inadequate resources available.It is easy to consider those who are looking at the dashboard. They are leaders and stakeholders and can intimidate you. People who work for these leaders may be expected to compile data and approve updates to the dashboard, or it may be expected that new production support resources will do this. The most fun happens when there is disagreement over who is going to do the work.

If hiring is needed, consider hiring early so that the new resource(s) will be able to learn the process, but even help with implementation and documenting and procedures and management.

You can build on these ideas for activities in your WBS. But first, make sure you build your WBS to avoid confusion between your project communication and the dashboard being created by your PPM project.