PMO Bytes

Let me introduce myself. I am ‘Mister Ant’. Yes, the six-legged, hardworking Formicidae that you usually pass by without taking a second look. If not for the crumb trail we left behind, you would not have even noticed us, despite the fact that we had shifted from the peony in your garden to the back of the cabinet in your kitchen a few weeks ago. What a lousy host you are.

I stay with my family, working day and night to grow our colony. As we live most of our lives in underground darkness, we have to rely on the use of a special chemical called ‘pheromone’ to communicate. This is both a blessing and a curse. Be it a discovery of a new food source or a warning of a looming danger, we benefited much from this unique way of communication. I know you Homo sapiens hate your own body odor, but for us, it is our fundamental survival skill. Since young, we were taught to obey instructions dutifully like a law-abiding citizen. Likewise, we apply the same herd mentality in the way we doggedly track down pheromone scent along the trail that leads to our food source. We have been practicing this over and over again with an unwavering faith. So far, it has yet to fail us.

Everything was fine until recently. It seems like we have been following the same track for quite some time. At first, there was no sign at all. As fatigue started to sink in, some of us got grouchy and broke away from the file. Nobody knows what is going on although a few of the veterans suspect that something strange is happening. Apparently, we have unknowingly fallen into an ‘ant mill’ entrapment – a phenomenon in which each of us staunchly follows the one in front, thereby forming a continuously rotating circle. Sometimes, this rare phenomenon is also known as ‘Spiral of Death’. It is a taboo in our clan. So, no one dare to talk about it openly. Nevertheless, recently there was this valiant fool who was bold enough to suggest that we might have been trapped in this fatal entanglement. As expected, his voice was instantly crushed under the barrage of vitriolic rebuttals from the gainsayers and authorities. The poor chap was eventually brushed aside and dismissed as having a hallucinated fantasy. This is a common tragedy in large primeval families like us. We get too entrenched in our heredities, both good and bad ones, unwilling to shake them off. It looks like the several millions years of evolution has not made us any smarter. Once we have identified something that works, we will cling on to it like a limpet, reluctant to let go.

“Is this right?” I have been asking myself over and over again lately. Ironically, this is the same old culture that we have lived in for millions of years. Although we may have evolved physically, our culture remains untainted by time. And culture is a strange thing – we are part of it, yet so apart from it. Hence, I guess there is no straight answer to my dilemma. The closest explanation that I can find is perhaps a stigmergic coordination failure resulting from the impact of the ‘Abilene paradox’ complication. Sounds esoteric? Okay, in layman’s terms, it means “the blinds following the blinds with a naïve fear of rocking the boat”. Every morning, we embark on a food-hunting expedition with this foolhardy goal in mind – to find new food sources. However, I have never seen any proper plans or instructions. Everything is ad hoc and depends on spontaneity. The only strategy we count on is ‘the blinds following the blinds’ with the help of the pheromone cue of course. We repeat this cycle every day, rain or shine. Be it skittering across the torrid sand or tiptoeing around the puddles of water, we move on without questioning the sanity of the mission or the risks we have to take. No one knows if we will get lucky and achieve our goal for the day or we will fall into another unforeseen deathtrap. Each trip is a new challenge. No time to bid farewell. We just ‘trial’ our best.

Unfortunately, the food supply in our nest continues to deplete, yet there is still no sign of new food sources. Our foragers are still on the march, full of hope, with the rest of us catching up from behind in a frenzied manner. I am not sure how long we can keep going at this rate as the tired legs have started to take their toll. Perhaps, all of us will die of exhaustion very soon unless there is a change. And yes, there should be a change if we want to have ourselves extricated from this entanglement. We need a leader to guide us through this. Well, we do have a leader although most of us have probably forgotten that. She is the ‘Red Queen’ – this is what we call her. The problem is she is not with us in this expedition. Perhaps she is now in the nest, happily indulging herself over the supreme power of her reign while waiting to be fed, oblivious to the calamity that is going to befall on us in the field. What a superb personification of a lousy, yet extremely common, leadership. Is she doing anything at all to save us? Obviously not. Maybe she is just too far away to be able to know what to do. In other words, we have to depend on ourselves and hang on to the last streak of faith that is left in us. Yet, there is only a thin line between faith and foolishness. Many of us still believe that there will be a miracle. That explains why we are still on the march. Pretty naïve huh? I do remember what Orson Welles once said – “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” It is time to stop dreaming. There will be no miracle waiting for us ahead, only debacle. When the sun rises again, there will be another forager group sent out to replace us. I wish them the best of luck. I wish we will be remembered for our pluck.

Okay, I admit. The title of this article ‘Revenge Moment’ is an anagram of ‘Green Movement’. Perhaps, nature is sending us a subtle warning message about its sweet revenge moment if we do not take green movement seriously. Sounds spooky.

There are already a lot of write-ups and propagandas out there flooding the streets, intoxicating the feeble minds with praises of green initiatives and sustainability. In fact, some would even consider it overhyped – good from far, but far from good. This does not come as a surprise with the long, and increasing, list of failed green innovations that includes some of the craziest ideas that look good on the paper, but bad in practical application. However, nothing is perfect. We should not imprudently abandon the entire basket full of apples just because a few rotten ones were found. Sustainability does have its value and purposes and is something that worth our effort to explore further particularly in the domain of project management.

The word ‘sustainability’ has various definitions affixed to it. What do we actually mean when we mention ‘sustainability’ especially from the perspective of project management? Wikipedia provides some interesting definitions of ‘sustainability’ that includes,

“For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other organisms.”

In addition, Alan Atkisson gives a more specific definition by saying “Sustainability is the ability of a system to continue working (and evolving) over the long term within certain boundaries and under certain conditions.” From this, if we take project as the system and triple constraints as the conditions, we may then interpret sustainability for project management as the ability to keep the project going, without prematurely exhausting all its resources, until it has achieved all its predefined objectives. As Janine Benyus, co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8 and author of “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, aptly advises, “You cannot use more energy than you need. You've got to sip energy and you've got to share every material use that you possibly can, because it's expensive to procure that material.” The same thing should apply to managing projects. We have to be prudent with our scarce resources as we work within the boundaries of the triple constraints. So what can we learn from the environmentalists? Perhaps, we may borrow some ideas from the three R’s concepts – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle – which are at the core of sustainability and green movement. These are separate, yet interconnected, concepts that share the same goal of reducing waste.

Let’s start with Reduce. We all know that a typical project produces piles of documentations that hardly read by anyone besides the project manager. Do we really need them or are we just producing tons of digital trash following a rigid process blindly? Similarly, we are also producing a lot of reports and project management deliverables that may help in the project execution, but do not necessary constitute to the final product that the project has to deliver. A good example is the periodical reports that we send out to the stakeholders. Do we need to do it daily, weekly or monthly? I am not saying that reporting, which is a crucial part of communication, is not important. What we do seriously need to consider is how much is too much so that we do not overproduce what we genuinely need. Reduce is all about the effort of reducing the amount of waste produced by a person, a group, or a society, and in so doing to minimize resource and energy use. One way we may reduce waste in projects is to streamline the project management process and make it more flexible. Instead of having a fixed process for all types of projects, we may introduce several simpler and leaner processes specifically designed for smaller projects. In these processes, we may skim off the less critical project management deliverables so as to avoid producing something that no one really needs.

Reuse is a concept where an item is used again, without reprocessing, for the same or different function to help save time, money, energy, and resources. Most of us should not be unfamiliar with it since we are naturally inclined to do things in the cheapest and fastest way. The basic idea is to avoid reinventing the wheel. If you have used some project management deliverable templates like those offered by gantthead.com to manage your projects then you have already practiced the concept of Reuse. In fact, methodologies, processes, guidelines and standard practices are all different manifestations of Reuse. This concept is also applicable to project deliverables. Programmers around the world have been practicing code reuse for decades to improve software quality and to cut down turnaround time. Among all these, I am particularly interested in the various possible ways we could reuse the knowledge from the lessons we have learned from our failures. How many of you out there actually begin your project kick-off meeting with a review on previous lessons learned? Do you even use the lessons learned records as a reference when you conduct risk identification?

The Recycle concept differs slightly from Reuse in that it involves breaking down an item or its components into raw materials, reprocessing and reassembling them into something new. For example, plastic bottles can be collected, recycled and made into pathways and benches. A major challenge for the Recycle concept is the extra resources required to collect, transport, sort, and reprocess the recyclable materials, which may potentially outweigh the net resources saved in the process. What are the materials and artifacts that we may recycle in a project? In order to answer this question, we should first examine the individual components that make up the project and this is where the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) comes in handy. We may even include a session in the project postmortem to analyze the WBS so as to identify deliverables that are recyclable. Or perhaps, we should install a couple of project recycle bins labeled with “Tangible” and “Intangible” in the company to see what trash people will start dumping in.

Alright, enough of greenwashing for now before I start calling my project managers the ‘Green Lanterns’ and forcing them to recite “In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight…”

What is reverse delegation? Reverse delegation is a term that describes a situation whereby a manager delegates a task to his or her direct report, but only to take it back, for one reason or another, to work on it sometime later. There are two ways, forced and unforced, that this may take place. In the forced way, the push back comes directly from the direct report that received the delegated task, whereas in the unforced way, the manager voluntarily takes back the delegated task and work on it. Regardless of whether it is forced or unforced, when it occurs, it reflects an ineffective delegation from a weak leadership. Most of you should be familiar with this and perhaps, involved in similar situations in the past. If not, below are some scenarios that may help ring a bell.

1. You are the boss: Sometimes, employees may have this misguided assumption that since you are the manager, and presumably having a much bigger paycheck, you should be more capable and in a better position to handle a knotty problem in hand even though the task was assigned to them. So, whenever a problem arises, you will get a knock at the door followed by a panicky voice “Boss, can you look into this?” The smarter ones will probably say it with a little bit of flattery “You’re the boss. If you can’t handle this, no one can.” Somehow, they had forgotten that they were hired to solve their managers’ problems and not the other way round.
2. In the loop: Another assumption that employees often make is that as long as they keep their managers in the loop in everything, they are in good hands. The usual response to a problem will then be “This is not my problem anymore. Since my manager is aware of the situation, she should take care of it.” What a clever way of escalating problem. However, this should not be taken as an excuse for shirking of responsibility. Expecting that the managers will intervene and solve their problems for them by keeping them in the loop is another subtle form of reverse delegation.
3. I don’t know: It is very easy to say “I don’t know how to do.” Some people will even think that it is not their problems since they do not know or do not have the skills to complete the job. No doubt, there is nothing wrong with this statement; however, the attitude towards it makes a difference. No one is born to be omnipotent. The question is “Are you even trying?” I have seen employees putting up their hands asking for help so often that their managers have to guide them in every single step. This is as good as the managers doing their jobs for them.
4. Getting it right: “Damn it! Why can’t you just get it right?” We hear this once in a while blasting out from the manager’s room on a quiet Monday morning.  If you find yourself spending endless discussions and reviews with your direct reports to fix up the problems they have in the jobs that you have delegated to them, then you are in serious trouble. You have either picked the wrong guy for the job or the person is simply not motivated to get it done properly. Either way, you are stuck and shouting does not seem to help anyway. Regardless of the numerous reviews both of you had, your direct report still failed to deliver what you want. You are tempted to give up and say “Let’s forget it! Just pass it back to me. I’ll do it.” If you really do so, then you are falling into another classic trap of reverse delegation.
5. Control freak: Most managers are narcissistic. They consider themselves to be better than anyone else and they do not trust the employees to do their jobs. They believe that the only way to get the job done is to do it themselves. If you are one of them, you will probably find yourself micromanaging your team most of the time. More likely than not, you will spend your day reviewing every single thing they do and checking through their mails to ensure everything is alright before allowing them to be sent. In some cases, you may even take back the delegated task and work on it yourself with the confidence that no one can do it better than you. It is time to wake up, control freak!

As a project manager, we often need to rely on others to help us with tasks that we either do not have the capability or do not have the capacity to handle. Delegation is, therefore, a crucial skill that project managers should excel in. Ironically, this is the area where most of us had flunked badly. What can we do to improve our delegation effectiveness in order to avoid reverse delegation embarrassments like those described above?

1. Roles & Responsibilities: The first thing we need to address is to get the roles and responsibilities clearly defined and ensure everyone knows what to do – i.e. the employees should know that it is their responsibility, not their managers’ responsibility, to get the job done while the managers should learn to let go once they have delegated the job. Without a good clarity in roles and responsibilities, it is easy to get confused between obligation and escalation. Easy as it may sound, but many people do not seem to get this right.
2. Empower the team: The saddest thing that can happen to a project team is the delegation of responsibility without authority. It is like putting your team in the driver's seat with a missing steering wheel. Apart from the risk of having your team crashed, you probably also have to struggle to cope with the deluge of decisions that you have to make day after day. In other words, although you have delegated the tasks to your team, you are still pretty much heavily involved in them at the same time. Your team will keep coming back to you for directions and approvals if you have failed to empower them.
3. Trust your team: Avoid micromanagement at all costs. Learn to let go and trust that your team can get the job done. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” Make sure you give your team ample freedom and privacy to work on the delegated tasks with the least harassment from the hawk-eyed management. If you find yourself charting the number of personal calls your direct reports make on a single day, watch out as you are going down a dark path that many managers had trodden and perished.
4. The right guy for the job: You would never want to set your team up for failure. Yet, you understand that an occasional adequate amount of stress and pressure will help them to grow. Successful delegation is about having the right balance and depends a lot on selecting the right people with the required skills and capabilities to do the job. Failure to do so will likely leave you with a handful of unfinished tasks to follow up. The worst part is you will also have a demoralized and demotivated team to deal with.
5. Making mistakes is fine: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” said Albert Einstein. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. People that are afraid of making mistakes will usually tend to shy away from problems. Create an environment that encourages people to make mistakes. As Ron Ashkenas advised in his recent HBR Blog article “…failure is not only appropriate but absolutely necessary, most times to generate learning and improvement”, once your team understood that learning from mistakes is an essential part of the routine for improvement, it will be less likely that they will throw the problem back to you when they hit the dead end.
6. Don’t be a hero: It is always tempting to rush to the rescue when someone calls for help. It makes you feel great that you are needed. The problem is as long as you are still wearing the Captain America mask, your team will not stop calling for help whenever they bump into a problem. You need to cut this habit before your team grows into overly dependent on you. The only way to stop this is to drop the mask and resist the temptation of being a hero. Your team needs to be more independent. They can never do that if you are still babysitting them. For example, you may want to ensure that your team should never come to you with just the problem alone and expecting you to solve for them; they should at least come up with a few proposals for discussion.
7. Provide support: Support, don’t just ask for reports. When you delegate, it doesn’t mean that you can withdraw yourself completely. Do remember that you can delegate authority, but not accountability. You are still fully accountable. Have you given your team the support that they need to get their job done? It may not always have to be something complicated. Sometimes, simple things like a few timely sage advices and encouragements are good enough to get the team going. However, there is a difference between being a supportive manager and being a hero. Do not cross the line.

My heart cringes whenever I hear someone says ‘Proven Method’. What do we mean when we utter the word ‘Proven’?

“This method is proven, so I am pretty sure it will work.” a colleague once said that to me.

“Do you actually mean ‘tested’ instead?” was my reply to him.

It is very common for us to hear this word in our day-to-day conversations. People try to shun other alternatives by self-proclaiming that their methods are proven. In fact, according to the psychology department at Yale University, the word ‘Proven’ is among the top ten power words that the marketing folks like to use in advertising. This is much expected. Why not? It is easy to remove fear and boost confidence with such a powerful word, isn’t it? Subconsciously, we tend to associate proven method with guaranteed success without giving it a second thought. This makes it convenient for people to abuse the use of the word to gain quick buy-in. However, can anything be proven at all?

In these days, people usually rely on scientific method to help them test hypotheses and confirm theories. Unfortunately, this has been frequently mistaken as an evidence of proof itself. That is why we often hear things like “MSG is scientifically proven to cause obesity” and “50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” etc. Testing hypotheses and confirming theories do not lead to a proof of anything; they are just telling us that the observations we obtained in repeated experiments corroborate with the explanations we have on the subject we are investigating. In fact, in his foundational work, “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, Karl Popper argued that science cannot prove anything at all. No, this is not a typo error and there is nothing wrong with your eyes. According to Popper, the very fundamental criterion for a hypothesis, proposition or theory to be considered scientific is that it has to be falsifiable or refutable. In other words, although science cannot help us to prove anything, it can, on the contrary, help us to reject theories and axioms that are currently believed to be true. For instance, if someone claims that his method has never failed; can he then assert that his method is proven to work every time? He might have provided evidence and facts to justify that his method had worked N number of times in different contexts in the past, but from a scientific perspective, he is still not able to prove that his method will never fail unless he has tested it infinitely, which obviously can never happen. Therefore, the only conclusion we may draw is that his method has a very good chance to work in the next time round. In a way, this reminds me of a well-known saying – “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”; just like we cannot prove that “all swans are white” simply because no one has seen a swan that is not white in color.

The interesting part in this whole dilemma is that most people are susceptible to powerful words like ‘Proven Method’. Of course, we love encouraging and positive claims, don’t we? How many times have you found yourself buying a product just because it has the words ‘Scientifically Proven’ printed on its packaging? We succumb too easily and willingly even though, deep inside, we know the problems and the lack of validities of these claims. So, why are people still falling preys to these meaningless word games? Perhaps, it is as a result of laziness, or simply down to the fact that we are naturally inclined to false hopes. We just accept the claims happily, blindly and without doubt. However, something that works for others may not necessarily work for you as there are too many factors that will affect the outcome. Not to forget that there are also various validity issues related to the evidence presented that need further evaluation before you can give any reasonable conclusion. For example, are the evidence measured objectively or subjectively? Is the sample size appropriate? Watch out also for the ‘cum hoc ergo propter hoc’ and ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ fallacies. Without scrutinizing the validity of the evidence, there is no way that we can confidently accept any claim. So, next time when you bump into an ignorant, yet bigheaded, vendor that says something like “Don’t worry. Trust us. Our method is proven!” I am quite sure you will know what to ask.

Okay now, after rambling through all these, what am I trying to prove?

“Oh! So you’re from the Piss Me Off department”, an ex-colleague once said this me in the early days of my career.

I replied with a willy-nilly shrug. Not sure when it all started, but the once promising Project Management Office (PMO) has somehow fallen and become a bête noire to most people. Some of them would just loathe it like what my ex-colleague did. Then there are those who would shun the PMO folks entirely as if they are from the insurance companies. Patience and confidence ebb away as more and more PMOs fail to live up to their promises. J. LeRoy Ward, Executive Vice President of ESI International, sent off a clear warning message when he reported that the average life expectancy of a PMO is 4.1 years according to the “Global State of the PMO for 2012” survey recently conducted by ESI. Setting up a PMO is not easy. Running the PMO and sustaining its operations in the long run is even tougher. Do you have the mettle to take up the challenge?

After a couple of years of setting up and managing PMO, I have managed to pick up a bundle of tips along the way on how to make this journey a more fruitful one. The basic idea is to manage each PMO setup like you would for a new product. Many PMO setups failed because they were treated as a one-time endeavor. So far, people were mainly interested in the initial work of bringing a PMO into live with very little attention given to nurturing and sustaining the newly established team. By running the PMO in a product management way, it forces one to come up with better plans to manage the team’s developments and growths throughout its entire lifecycle. Below are some useful tips for your consideration.

1. Support: Every product or project needs a sponsor without doubt. The first thing you should do is get a strong sponsor behind your PMO. Preferably, this person should be someone from the top management, committed and know what he is going to sign up for. Do not underestimate the role of the sponsor as you will need him to drive through several big initiatives along the way. Ideally, the sponsor should also assist to secure a good financial funding required to support the operations of the PMO in the long run. One of the more serious problems commonly reported is the lack of executive support. Lip service remains as the favorite sport in the top management. Do you usually have a ‘steering committee’ or just ‘staring committee’?
2. Requirements: We know that the key purpose of having a PMO is to provide services. But what type of services? You won’t be able to answer this without first knowing the requirements and expectations of your stakeholders. Talk to your key stakeholders on what they would expect from the PMO. Understand the problems at hand that keep them awake at night and how they would like the PMO to help them. Build the PMO around services that address the immediate needs of your stakeholders. Select the type of PMO model that best fit the operations and services that it has to offer. The types of PMO may vary from reporting, supportive, controlling to directive depending on the degree of control and influence needed on the projects which, in a way, link back to the requirements and expectations of the stakeholders. In addition, while deciding on the type of PMO that works best for your organization, you will also need to take into consideration the current organization culture, maturity level and internal competency to avoid creating a big gap between what you want to achieve versus what you can achieve. You may start off with something that you are comfortable with and evolve it along the way as the team matures and competency level gets better.
3. Roadmap: It is impossible to meet all the requirements in one ‘big bang’. Don’t be greedy. Break them up in sizable chunks and set targets to achieve them in different milestones. Just like the lifecycle of a product, a roadmap helps you to envisage what you want your PMO to be eventually and marks out the various milestones along the way to achieve the end goal. However, it is important to align the roadmap with the maturity of the organization and to have a timeline that matches the internal competency of the team. Without a roadmap, no one knows where the end of the road will lead to. Your team will have no focus and your stakeholders will lose confidence in the team as they do not know what to expect from them.
4. Team: You will need a lot of brains and brawns to get your PMO to where you want it to be. Should you go for the subject matter experts or stick with the project management experts? Choose your team members wisely so that there is a good mix of diversified talents and skills. Select those that have the right attitude, strong passion, and share your vision for the PMO. Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury to pick his team. If you are one of those unlucky ones, you will need to include training and development plans to bring the team up to the expected competency level while you grow the PMO. It is not easy to have any advancement when your whole team is too far behind.
5. Improve: As part of the product lifecycle management, it is crucial to plan for future improved versions of product releases. In the same way, you should also set some plans on how you may improve and grow your PMO. Promote continual improvement as part of your team culture. Integrate it into your internal processes. If possible, appoint someone to oversee and drive improvement initiatives for the PMO. But where should you start from? Simply put – “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”. This old adage reminds us the importance of performance measurement. Start by defining KPIs for the PMO with respect to the targets you have set previously. Have a dashboard or wall chart to monitor the KPIs. Pin it up in a prominent location where everybody can see it. Review the KPIs with the team periodically and set corrective action plans to improve the condition.

By all means, the tips given above are never meant to be all-inclusive and they are just based on my personal experience. Nevertheless, I hope these tips will be able to help those who have or intend to embark on this adventurous journey. Remember, you are never alone.