PMO Setup T3 - Tips, Tools, and Techniques

In this nice little book, the author provides seven principles of Acknowledgement that can be used by just about anyone in any setting, including of course, project management.

• #1 - The world is full of people who deserve to be acknowledged.
  
• #2 - Acknowledgement builds intimacy and creates powerful interactions.
  
• #3 - Acknowledgment neutralizes, defuses, deactivates and reduces the effect of jealousy and envy!
  
• #4 - Recognizing good work leads to high energy, great feelings, high-quality performance and terrific results.
• #5 - Truthful, heartfelt and deserved acknowledgment always makes a difference, sometimes a profound one, in a person’s life and work.
  
• #6 - It is likely that acknowledgment can improve the emotional and physical health of both the giver and the receiver.
  
• And #7 - Practice different ways of getting through to the people you want to acknowledge.
  

Judy’s book is a short little 112 page read and you can buy it from IIL at www.iil.com for $14.95. Get the book and practice all of the principles, or just try one or two of them out for size.

1. Get a real commitment! Know the difference between a real commitment and a brush-off. Beware of best effort generalities such as "I'll try", or "you know I will give it my best shot", or "you can count on me to get it done." Get a specific commitment from the performing resource in measurable terms such as "how much, by when" to do the work promised.
2. Put commitments in writing. When you reach an oral agreement, put it in writing. This serves to both clarify the agreement that you have reached and to set a permanent reminder or expectation for the commitment. Often times, people tend to think that when they promise things verbally that it is okay to not totally live up to, and honor, the commitment. A written confirmation will emphasize the seriousness of the commitment.
3. Involve the people that have the authority. Confirm with the manager or supervisor of your performing resource that the time you need from the resource and the work to be performed by the resource is understood and agreed to. This establishes a relationship with the performing resource's supervisor and reduces the chances that the supervisor will inadvertently assign too much other work to the performing resource.
4. Be specific regarding how much, by when. Often, when resources are unable to complete assigned project tasks, it is because they had a misunderstanding of the results you wanted, the time frame you needed, or the effort needed to produce those results. Be specific regarding what you want, when you want it, and how much work effort it will take. Clarity enables accountability.
5. Inform others about the person's commitment. Don't keep commitments, especially shared resource commitments, a secret. Tell others about them. No one wants to have their professional reputation put at risk, so the more people know about the commitment that you have from a shared resource, the more likely that resource will be to ensure that their commitment to you is met. Conversely, if only the two of you know about the commitment, it may not seem as critical to your performing resource and it may seem easier to break.
6. Inspect what you expect. Project team participants need to know what you expect of them and when you expect it and the expectations need to be specific and measurable, not generalities. You must inspect what you expect regularly as your follow up sends a clear message that you expect the performing resource to follow through at their end. When you inspect, be mindful to both confirm that which has been accomplished and to offer or determine any areas of help or information that are needed to finish tasks.
7. Continually stress the importance of the task. Usually, during the project kickoff meeting the project manager presents the overall project plan, discusses the details of the project tasks, and stresses the importance of project and tasks and their critical path. However, as the project progresses, team members can often think that their particular task is not so important or critical to the project timeline resulting in missed deadlines or waiting to the last moment to finish work. Continually stress the importance of the task as team members will only view the task as important as you do.
8. Immediately confront poor performance. Don’t allow poor performance to continue. Immediately confront performance that is not meeting agreed to expectations whether this is poor quality work, work that is incomplete, or work that is late. Rather than looking the other way or hoping the project team member’s performance will come around, immediately step in to get things back on track. Take the appropriate actions to ensure the project team member can actually do the task, has the time and skills to deliver what has been committed. If necessary, escalate to functional management especially if they are the cause of the problem or part of the problem.
9. Immediately praise good performance. When your team member delivers the promised work on time or ahead of schedule, always acknowledge that good performance. Tell them and their functional manager how much you appreciate their efforts and how important their contribution was to the project’s success.
10. Act as if you have the authority. Often times, project managers have very little real authority in terms of reporting structure, or budget, or even being part of the leadership team’s decision making process. But, in fact, project managers do have authority. When a person commits to do work for you, when a functional manager commits resources to you, when an executive commits their time and attention to you, you as project manager have authority over all of that. And, you have the right to exercise that authority.

As always, if you have a People Accountability tip or two, share it here..!

1. Understanding how SharePoint fits into your PMO. SharePoint is a Microsoft offering that provides the server infrastructure to support needs that information workers have such as collaboration, document storage, and the ability to inform others and to be informed by others. While understanding the technology and features of SharePoint is important, understanding how SharePoint fits within your existing PMO and how it can be used by all those involved in support of executing the best practices of the PMO is even more important.
2. Identify and replace disparate repositories. Many organizations have disparate repositories for storing information that quickly erode into a collection of information dumping grounds. Seek to identify and replace with your SharePoint the following kinds of disparate repositories:
   • Documents, spreadsheets, and images stored on PC hard drives
   • Documents, spreadsheets, and images stored on network shares
   • Reference materials stored in three-ringed binders
   • Calendar appoints and todos stored on cork boards
   • Archived files stored on Zip drives and CDs
   • Links for web resources found in a user's My Favorites folder
   • Flip charts and sticky noted from brainstorming sessions and meetings
   • Worker knowledge stored in the heads of subject matter experts
3. Accessing structured assets with SharePoint. Structured assets are found in the databases of the formal systems of the company. Though it is easy to query and aggregate data from these systems, accessing these systems is often difficult to do and it can be challenging to teach busy executives how to login, navigate menus, and run reports to get the information they need. SharePoint makes it possible and easier to control and customize access to these structured assets as well as to consolidate data that comes from multiple back-end sources.
4. Managing unstructured assets with SharePoint. Unlike structured assets, less structured assets such as Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Visio workflows, etc, are not usually stored in databases. Contrary to what IT staff may think, these assets are stored in more locations than just file servers such as PC hard drives, email folders, removable media, as well as printed and stored in filing cabinets. By providing a manageable environment for less structured information, SharePoint enables and makes it possible to standardize, share, archive, backup and restore, secure, audit, analyze, and legitimize the unstructured assets of the organization.
5. Use SharePoint as the hub. Companies make significant investments in people and technologies. With IT staff already overburdened, it is not surprising to find little support and enthusiasm for implementing yet another complex, high maintenance vendor application. The result is that many users, despite all the advances in systems and technology, find themselves increasingly alienated and isolated from their companies information environments. Most end users will tell you that there is a missing link. Using SharePoint as a hub solves this problem and provides users with access to their information assets.
6. Continually sell your SharePoint. When you and your team discover new features, capabilities, and uses of SharePoint, don't be surprised if everyone else doesn't see the same value that you do. Take the time to show and explain the business value of SharePoint. Seeing is believing and often your users have to see SharePoint in action to understand its value over business as usual approaches.
7. SharePoint isn't right for every organization. Be open to the fact that SharePoint isn't right for every organization. If you have difficulty getting people to cooperate with you or to see the value in SharePoint as a collaborative platform over other alternatives, then you and your organization may be best served by waiting until the winds of change come through. Since it is very difficult to prove the value or push a new way of thinking, be prepared to plant new ideas and be ready to act upon them when the time is right for the organization to fully embrace the change.
8. Using lists with Excel and Access. Quite often, individual departments use spreadsheets and databases for analyzing and keeping track of data. And just as often, the information technology department is completely unaware of these things. As a result, IT may have a problem when a department's spreadsheet stops working or when a department outgrows its database. SharePoint provides extensive features for integrating with Excel and Access such as creating one-to-one relationships between spreadsheets and databases to SharePoint lists providing a natural repository for working with tables, rows, and columns.
9. Managing business processes using workflows. Managing a PMO is all about managing processes and many of these processes are mostly manual. SharePoint provides extensive support for managing organizational processes by using workflows. SharePoint can generate tasks and other kinds of list items to drive movement through the workflow. Rather than keeping all the information about processes filed away where few people will take the time to find and read them, SharePoint has a workflow feature that triggers and tracks the processes associated with your documents.
10. Using Portal Sites. SharePoint 2007 provides a new kind of site template called a portal site template. The portal site template lets you define a hierarchy of sites such as a PMO site and project sites that can all be created at once. So, rather than creating project sites one at a time with site templates, portal site templates create a set of multiple sites that are intended for use together.

As always, if you have a SharePoint tip or two, share it here..!

Does your PMO have an award program for its project managers? Has your PMO considered, "Night Out On The Town Awards?"

Well, not too long ago, I had the pleasure of visiting with a good friend who is the PMO manager for a mid-sized corporation. We actually worked together over 20 years ago and have kept in touch over the years. One of the challenges that my good friend told me that he faced when he was hired to create the office of the PMO was that he joined a company that did not have a culture of recognizing and rewarding stand-out performance. The company did offer very competitive salaries, but beyond that there was little incentive compensation and even less management reserve for bonuses and awards. Whether this was the cause or a symptom of a something else, the end result was that the PMO team lacked an esprit décor and while the overall morale wasn’t bad, it wasn’t that good either. The staff no doubt got along, but did not have that synergistic camaraderie, teamwork, and sense of belonging that so often is the trademark of high-performance teams.

As a manager, it can be sometimes difficult to force people to behave in ways they don’t want to or are not accustomed to, but when the right environment is created sometimes this behavior starts to happen on its own. And that is what my good friend, the PMO manager, set out to do. He presented to his boss, the CIO, an idea and budget request for $1,000 to implement the idea. His idea was to once a quarter, during the quarterly PMO meeting - this is a longer and more comprehensive department meeting than the weekly PMO meetings - he wanted to give out a “Night Out On The Town Award” of $250 for one of the project managers to enjoy along with his or her significant other. The criteria for the award was PMO Manager discretionary which meant the PMO Manager could use it for any number of contributions made by the team. The key point was that the PMO Manager wanted to provide a little bit of Manager-level recognition that would serve both to recognize contribution as well as to provide the opportunity to let the "significant other" of the project manager to participate and be appreciated. After all, often times, extraordinary effort at work does come at the expense of one’s personal life in one way or another.

After the first year, four awards had been given out, and though they were a very small item in the scheme of all that was done in that first year, the recipients and the team at large really enjoyed the program and looked forward, in a very friendly collegial way, to the quarterly PMO meeting and finding out who the next winner of the award would be. And, after, everyone was anxious to find out how and where the “Night Out On The Town Award” was used. Was it fine dining, a dinner play, a sporting event, etc.

Now, not every organization is right for this kind of award. It is not a lot of money and in some organizations where other recognition programs are in place, such an award may not be necessary. But if your PMO lacks a certain level of morale, team well being, and behavior; take a moment to think about things that you can do to influence the environment and facilitate the results you want. Of all that we do as managers, sometimes it is the little things that have the big effects.