The Business Driven PMO

In order to stay competitive, today’s top management is confronted with the critical task of analyzing and improving the ability of an organization to change, survive, and grow in this complex and changing global economy.

Organizations have thus been moving from operations and business as usual, to implementing change through project management as part of their competitive strategy. The ability to successfully execute projects is what drives the realization of intended benefits and the achievement of business objectives.

Organizations that execute projects successfully employ effective Project Portfolio Management (PPM) practices as a tool to manage and drive change. Given the strategic impact that projects have on business, organizations must follow effective PPM processes that capitalize on innovation; measure progress, value, and risks; and confirm that the right projects can be delivered in alignment with organizational strategy

We at Daptivconducted a survey to examine the challenges faced by today’s businesses now thatincreased scrutiny over budgets (aka “doing more with less”), efficiency and effectiveness are key factors of successful organizations. The survey’s main objective was to identify current trends in PPM, and pinpoint the characteristics of PPM that are applied in higher-performing organizations. This survey was conducted among 300 project managers and senior executives attending the PMXPO Conference. Some of the key inferences from the survey were:

Why do product managers and senior executives take on PPM and implement software to support it? According to our survey, their top reasons (in order) are prioritizing projects, gaining visibility into live projects, planning and preparing for future projects, and managing cost and resources. A whopping 62% answered “all of the above”. This makes obvious that PPM is providing a lot more value than simply improving project execution.

Assessing the current adoption of Project Portfolio Management across sectors, the survey revealed that 64 percent of the respondents use PPM tools to manage their general IT projects while the remaining respondents deployed PPM solutions for compliance, product development, training and mobile related projects.

While establishing and communicating projects goals to the project management team can assist in the identification of project risks and constraints that may impede the achievement of those departmental goals, limiting the scope of project portfolio management tools within an organization can have rippling side-effects in the overall achievement of organizational goals.  According to PMI’s 2012 Pulse of the Profession In-Depth Report: Portfolio ManagementReport, the majority of portfolio managers in highly effective organizations spend 75 percent or more of their time on portfolio management. The report further indicates that in organizations where managers focus on strategic as well as departmental goals, 70 percent of projects meet or exceed their forecasted ROI, compared to 50 percent at organizations where managers rarely focus on strategic goals.

Another interesting fact that came from the survey was that 76 percent of the respondents still use homegrown spreadsheets internally to manage projects in some capacity. Since 55 percent of respondents have more than 1,000 employees, this can easily lead to PPM data integrity issues and ponderously slow feedback loops. Definitely not a path that enables firms to pivot with rapidly changing business conditions. Moreover, from our experience this manual approach significantly impacts project performance. Today’s organizations need to see and trust information as it develops to make decisions that will help them outpace their competition.

While the BYOD movement is taking corporations by storm, our survey found that nearly 75 percent of respondents are not applying PPM techniques or software to their rollouts of smartphones and tablets.  IDC  recently forecasted that by 2017, total PCs are expected to drop to 13 percent, while tablets and smartphones will contribute 16.5 percent and 70.5 percent respectively. Considering the BYOD trend is only going to gain momentum in the near future, IT needs to get on the bandwagon and start actively managing this effort. Such forward-thinking strategic project planning transforms organizations from defensive and reactive to proactive and dynamic.

One of the key qualifications of a project is that it has a definite start and a definite end, though “ending” a project with a proper close-out process would appear to be an after-thought. Our survey revealed that 24 percent of the respondents do not conduct project reviews at all. That is a big number considering that of those who do, only 15 percent find they are meeting their project targets. The very last part of the project life-cycle it is often ignored even by large organizations, especially when they operate in multi-project environments. When the project is delivered, the closeout phase must be executed as planned. It plays a crucial role in sponsor satisfaction since it can create a lasting impression.

These findings are consistent with what we’ve experienced in our PPM consulting engagements. For many businesses, elements of PPM may already exist, but in non-linear and disjointed fragments. The most important factor in the success of PPM is aligning the portfolio with organizational strategy. The positive effects of strategic alignment lead to higher levels of project and portfolio performance, and increases stakeholder satisfaction with their organization’s project portfolio management practices at all levels of portfolio scale and complexity.

What makes a successful PMO?  A great deal of hard work?  Definitely.  But there are some other ingredients in that “special sauce” that enables a PMO to succeed.  Let’s explore.

A few years ago Jack Welsh of GE fame lead a keynote speech on large programs.  He was presenting to the business leaders of some of the largest enterprises in the world.  The speech began something like this:

“If you can’t get top management to support your program, don’t even bother.  Don’t even waste your time.”

Why did Jack say that?  Because to him, adoption is so important that a program is doomed to fail without it – all the way from the top to the bottom.  You can spend an extraordinary amount of time, effort and financial resources around setting up a program, developing a methodology and implementing a solution but without the team being ‘on board’ with your program you will have a very difficult time succeeding.

Once we can secure an executive sponsor, and have them attend the kick-off, and elaborate why the initiative is so important, what’s next?  The next step is making sure everyone is listening.  Does everyone in the program understand what the sponsor just elaborated?  Are they clear with what the objectives are?  Do they understand their role in helping achieve success?  One of the best examples that come to mind comes from the early 1960’s, before man landed on the moon, where President John F. Kennedy was touring the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center.  A humble and down to earth leader, JFK encountered a janitor as he was being guided through the facility.  He stopped the entourage and approached the janitor and asked him what he does there.  The janitor replied: “I’m putting a man on the moon.”  Surely he knew he wasn’t directly flying an astronaut to the moon, nor did the director of the space agency tell him to answer that way if the president asks.  No.  The mission of the center was so clear from the very top to the very bottom that every single person knew what their contributions were working towards.

Next idea has to do with appreciation for the stakeholders and user community.  A program is most successful when everyone is able to contribute to its design and change.  Capturing end user feedback and letting the PMO evolve and grow is essential.  Why is this so essential?  Simply because when we set out to design the program, we may not have taken everyone’s perspective into account.  We may also not have thought about how each role would interact.  But more importantly, you increase the chances of success by casting your feedback “net” as broadly as possible.  There’s an old story that helps demonstrate this idea.  On some highway, a trucker is driving his semi.  He approaches a bridge with a sign that warns of 13’ of clearance.  Thinking he can fit, he continues onward only to hear the sound of crushing metal and his truck quickly stopped.  He gets out of his rig and finds his trailer wedged under the overpass with no easy way to get out.  The state police are called followed by the civil engineer.  Bridge plans are reviewed and a crowd starts to gather.  A little girl walks up to the engineer and says “mister, why don’t you just take the air out of the truck’s tires?”  The truck is lowered and is now able to roll out.  Sometimes the best ideas come from the strangest places.  But even more important, one of the people in the community was able to share an idea that had a direct impact on solving a problem, enhancing a positive framework across the entire community.

Of course, there are many other aspects to user adoption, but getting the support from the entire organization, from the top to the bottom, is essential to your PMO’s success.

Expanding beyond team/social collaboration to business collaboration

The term “collaboration” has become one of the primary hot topics for businesses and analysts throughout the industry lately.  At its most basic level, “collaboration” simply means “working with others in a coordinated fashion toward a common goal.”  But few actually attempt to define what it really means in the context of business and PPM.

If you ask most people what capabilities define collaboration in the workplace, they generally talk about the sharing of information within a given team:  document management, threaded discussions, activity feeds, instant messaging, shared calendars, task assignments, facilitation of problem solving and idea development, communication of decisions and meeting minutes, etc.  This is all good, and certainly helps a team move forward in coordinated fashion toward the common goal of completing a project or specific unit of work.  Nearly all PPM solutions provide functionality to address each of these needs within the scope of a project.  SaaS PPM solutions are particularly well-suited to providing this level of team collaboration since, by their very nature, they are accessible to all team members regardless of geographic diversity and the information they contain is always available in near real-time.

I would argue, however, that this limited view of collaboration is incomplete.  Looked at from a broader perspective, an entire organization can be viewed as a collection of units which must all work together in a coordinated fashion toward the common goal of alignment and execution against the business’ corporate vision and strategic objectives.  Thus, business-level collaboration is necessary to establish the direction for an entire organization.  “Business Direction” includes the definition for the organization’s Vision, Goals and Strategies.  By sharing and collaborating on the Business Direction, the business teams will be better prepared to drive the various work efforts.  True business-level collaboration therefore depends on the free flow of information between the project teams and the outside world – management, other departments, executives, stakeholders, etc. – to facilitate proper alignment and effective decision-making throughout the entire organization.  It is this level of “business collaboration”, as opposed to individual “team collaboration”, which is often missing from a company’s collaboration strategy.  All too often, anyone not on the core project team is actually excluded from access to the system of record for project performance and must therefore depend upon periodic status updates or word-of-mouth communications to understand, participate, or make critical business decisions on project information.

Business collaboration provides a level of transparency and visibility to project details throughout an organization.  At its heart, business collaboration makes heavy use of enhanced dashboarding and powerful reporting capabilities to expose appropriate project information to those who are outside the core project team.  Ideally, facilitation of business collaboration also provides processes and methods for these external resources to submit inquiries and participate in discussions, access project documentation, and all of the other traditional collaboration capabilities as well.

When examining the collaboration strategy within your organization, be sure to keep the big picture in mind.  Team-level collaboration is certainly important.  But enabling collaboration across departments and across levels within a larger organization can often be even more critical to the success of the entire business.

A quick trip to Wikipedia yields the following definition for resource leveling: ‘a project management technique used to examine unbalance use of resources (usually people or equipment) over time, and for resolving over-allocations or conflicts.’ In other words, through resource leveling we can ensure that the project schedule is reasonable and realistic from a resource perspective – that the people or equipment needed to execute the work will be available when and where they are needed.

Sounds simple? The reality is that resource leveling needs to take multiple factors into account and can be anything but simple. And, like anything else that’s really complicated, most of us are looking for better tools to help us accomplish the task. That’s when the question about automatic resource leveling comes up.

While some project scheduling tools provide a process to see if resources are overloaded, others also provide a function that will recalculate the schedule to eliminate any overloads. As exciting as it may sound, in practice, it’s common to see that managers either never use it or even if they do, they don’t use the resulting schedule without making a lot of other adjustments. Why? Because even though automatic resource leveling can quickly ‘resolve’ overloads, it typically does it by delaying tasks until the resource is available. What it cannot do is account for human or project variables; all it does is throw some simple numbers. The solution uses elementary level math to solve a calculus-worthy problem.

While some project managers often take advantage of the speed of automatic leveling they really don’t trust the inferences drawn from the calculation to make their final decisions. They recognize that a resource leveled schedule requires a deeper understanding of the project work and the resource requirement to perform that particular task. It also requires a deeper analysis of more subtle options, tradeoffs, or variables to yield the optimal schedule.

In order to level resources in an efficient, meaningful way, a manager must keep in mind the following:

1. Resource leveling is not just a math problem. A project manager must consider more than the singular question of effort required over the duration of a task. Instead, one must also think about what makes sense for the type of work being performed. Some tasks can be completed in less time by adding more people but sometimes splitting up the work canactually increase the time required to complete it, since multiple efforts need to be coordinated and integrated- which makes it even more time consuming. If you have a team member that needs to attend a three-day class, adding another person will not reduce the time for the class to one and one-half days.
2. Keep an open mind. There are many different alternatives to consider when resource leveling. Sometimes it makes sense to work on multiple tasks concurrently while for other kinds of work dedicatedeffort is more practical. For example, having a team come together (either physically or virtually) to work through a plan or work through the details of a project deliverable may take less time than going through multiple cycles of email. Conversely, if we expect to have a document out for review, it is entirely reasonable to schedule the same resources that created that document to work on another task. You may also want to consider alternative ways of accomplishing the work – such as rearranging the order of tasks or using technological advances to reduce the time required for a given task. You also need to consider general workload –even though your estimates may indicate that someone can work on 20 tasks simultaneously, you may be building in inefficiency by asking people to juggle too many things at once. Ever tried reading a book in an airport and realize that you’ve just read the same paragraph three times (or more)? The fact is that each time you’re interrupted by a flight announcement, you probably don’t pick up at the exact spot you left off – you end up re-reading from a logical spot. The same happens when we try to rapidly switch between multiple tasks – the very act of switching makes us less
   efficient.
3. Don’t try to be too precise – Remember that everything in the schedule that you’re trying to level is based on estimates – timelines may change along the course of the project. Good resource leveling requires that you keep your eye on the big picture rather than micromanaging or focusing on granularities. Also, keep in mind that the further into the future you go, the less sure you will become of everything. Give up on the notion of leveling to the hour six months into the future – resource leveling is about making a reasonable schedule, not a precise schedule. The more granular you are, the more you will need to adjust when things change.

Resource leveling is an important part of the project management process, but it can’t be done automatically. While an automatic tool may be handy, it is not a substitute for good old-fashioned common sense from a real-live human being. A software package cannot appreciate the need for variation in an individual contributor’s day, nor does it understand, as a good manager would that sometimes tasks must be performed concurrently, and they are other times when it they cannot be. The bottom-line is that an automatic tool can begin the resource leveling process, but it cannot finish it without human help.

On a closing note, if you haven’t read Fredrick Brooks’ book, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, now would be a good time.

Although the Clinger-Cohen act was passed in 1996 that mandated a capital planning and investment control process, PPM as it’s found in the private sector is only just making its way to the federal government. As a recent memorandum from the Executive Office of the President notes, ‘the stove-piped and complex nature of the Federal enterprise has led over the years to a proliferation of duplicative and low priority investments in information technology (IT).’

The Federal Government is now focusing on maximizing the return on American taxpayers’ investment in government IT by instituting a new IT portfolio management process. Their goal is to root out waste across the Federal IT portfolio and avoid investment in low priority and duplicative ITinvestments.

As the Federal Chief Information Officer mentions in a blog post, over the next year agencies are required to lead agency-wide IT portfolio reviews within their respective organizations. This will lead totargets for IT spending reductions, illustrate how investments within the ITportfolio align with the agency’s mission and business functions, establishcriteria for identifying wasteful, “low-value,” or duplicative investments and improve governance and program management.

As election seasonstarts, it will be interesting to see how the different candidates discuss costreduction for the federal government. For our part, Daptiv recently partnered up with Winvale to help the government agencies with thiseffort. We hope over the next few years we can share some of our experience tohelp the US government’s IT portfolio reduce costs and improve business
outcomes.