Voices on Project Management

Kevin Korterud

In this high-demand/low-availability labor market, we all have to start re-thinking about how to staff one of the increasingly most pivotal roles in large, complex technology delivery: the program PMO lead.

In the past 10 or so years, we have all seen the size and scale of delivery dramatically increase as the business and technology landscape becomes more complex with multiple solutions, architectures, geographies, suppliers and organizations—and enabling layers such as cloud platforms. For new technology solutions as well as transformations, program delivery leads now spend more time than ever navigating this highly complex landscape—which leaves less time for traditional program management activities.

This situation has put an increased premium on the PMO lead role, which typically was portrayed as more of an administrative function. Ever more frequently, the PMO lead role has become closely integrated with the program delivery lead role in terms of guiding the trajectory of delivery…to the point where they resemble an adjunct delivery function to the program delivery lead.

The common dilemma today: Where does one find a PMO lead that can oversee the typical delivery operations activities such as risks, issues, workplans and tools—as well as assist the program delivery lead with critical delivery assurance efforts? In addition, how can we fill a PMO lead role with the right person in a timely manner as not to impair the mobilization progress of a delivery program?

As opposed to the traditional approach of trying to staff at the last minute when demand arises for a PMO lead role, the most effective path is to have the next generation of PMO leads on hand before you need them. Keep these three points in mind:                                                          

1. Recognize that large, complex and transformation PMOs require a unique mix of leadership skills. Programs are typically known to be a collection of delivery projects that directly fulfill a unified set of business needs. However, the landscape of programs has changed over the years where they now have to be implemented in a highly integrated, more complex technical and business environment. In addition, there can be transformative enablement capabilities such as value realization, organization change management and dependency management.

Given this landscape, PMO leads that solely oversee the execution of serial recurring PMO processes will not be successful. The PMO lead of today needs to have skills that transcend pure administrative execution by serving as a broker of conflicts, predictor of delivery volatility, as well as an organizational enabler of progress. In addition, to do so PMO leads now engage at a much higher level in an organization.

To achieve success, PMO leads need to have prior experience with complex delivery leadership, senior executive engagement as well as an ability to quickly grasp the delivery “big picture” in order to take action in a proactive manner. Traditional administrative backgrounds are not enough to prevail in today’s delivery environment.  

2. Domain and local knowledge is highly valuable. In addition to delivery leadership, executive engagement and the ability to sense prevailing conditions, it’s very helpful to have additional knowledge in the areas of business domains, as well as localized organizational characteristics.

For example, the learning curve of a PMO lead that spent most of their career in healthcare would have to be enormous to grasp the terminology and concepts of energy exploration; the converse is also true, when an energy exploration PMO lead serves on a healthcare program. In addition, organizational entities in companies may differ between regions and product lines.

There are a few methods to help ensure that domain and local knowledge needs are fulfilled. Where possible, prioritize PMO leads that have prior business experience in a specified domain area. To assist with understanding the organizational entities, consider the PMO lead shadowing the overall program delivery lead in recurring leadership meetings.

Where there are no available PMO leads with the necessary business domain nor local knowledge, consider providing business domain training as well as conducting immersion sessions for the prospective PMO lead in advance of their start of their role. It’s much quicker to take PMO leads with the right mix of modern-day competencies and incrementally bring them up to speed in these areas than it is to try and instruct a business domain lead on complex delivery.

3. Rotational PMO lead roles build more effective delivery leaders. In order for PMO leads to stay ahead of the game, their role needs to start in advance of delivery activities. In today’s complex environment, any delay in staffing a PMO lead will be detrimental. The best way to avoid this problem is to make the PMO lead role a rotational staff function. This enables it to be a training ground for future delivery leaders.

In the military and other organizations, the notion of a rotational staff assignment is quite common. In addition, it is highly prized given the visibility it provides—as well as the ability it creates to foster further career growth (which might not be found in a traditional assignment).

Current delivery leadership that needs to gain experience with more complex delivery, as well as experienced new joiners, are both examples of candidates for modern-day PMO lead roles. In addition, standard PMO lead training should be designed, built and deployed. Organizations that identify, groom and deploy PMO leads in a timely manner are already starting out ahead of their competitors. This model is not limited to employees of an organization; performing the same function with suppliers is also valuable to reduce the chance of late PMO lead fulfillment.

The function of a program management office has been both an integral and essential component of complex industrial delivery for almost 100 years. Over the past few decades, technology delivery leaders—as well as stakeholders—have gained a similar level of appreciation for the importance of the program PMO lead.

As demand continues to increase with no end in sight to the shortage of capable PMO leads, it’s best that companies start to build their own cadre of future PMO leads; this is essential for both staffing this role in a timely manner, as well as to ensure the growth of delivery capability.

I welcome any comments on what others are doing to help both staff program PMO roles, as well grow this function in your own organization.

By Peter Tarhanidis, PhD

As the pandemic stretches on, work-from-home programs continue to keep teams working virtually. During this time, we have performed courageously to deliver our strategic and business outcomes. Here I will share a select review of advice from industry experts as they explore how to build a post-pandemic response strategy.

According to McKinsey (2022), organizations have pivoted to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth toward building a better world. And Harvard Business Review (2020) notes that all types of companies have navigated the pandemic by pivoting their business models in the short term to survive—becoming more resilient in the long term.

Yet not all pivots generated an improved business outcome. Three trends in particular can help ensure a successful pivot:

1. Align the pivot to a long-term trend driven by the pandemic
2. Extend the firm’s existing capabilities, further solidifying the strategic plan
3. Sustain profitability, which preserves and enhances the brand’s value to the customer

PWC’s Global Crisis Survey identified three key lessons that businesses can adopt for long-term resilience:

1. Plan and prepare for inevitable disruption by establishing a crisis team
2. Integrate teams and cross-company competencies to enable effective responses
3. Build resilience governance into the organization’s culture

An opportunity, therefore, exists to consider how to prepare your team’s competence in driving synergy and resilience in order to lead post-pandemic growth strategies—and simultaneously pivot from those same strategies.

Here is a shortlist of what leaders can do to prepare for a post-pandemic recovery and support an organization:

1. Develop mental agility to pivot among key strategies and deliver business outcomes as key shifts and business challenges arise
2. Allow the process of learning to take effect across key leadership levels
3. Integrate PMI and agile frameworks to ensure flexible planning activities
4. Employ data analytics to support key insights in customer and marketplace forecasts
5. Clarify the governance of key plans and what event would trigger a decisive strategic pivot
6. Develop talent to migrate into new areas of company strategies and projects
7. Gather teams in person in order to create synergy and move from “norm” to “perform”

In the end, the teams that are ready to execute and can pivot as necessary will be ready for the post-pandemic competitive environment.

Let me know if you have uncovered additional successful strategies—or any pitfalls to avoid—in building team synergy and resilience.

References

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business
2. https://hbr.org/2020/07/how-businesses-have-successfully-pivoted-during-the-pandemic
3. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/crisis-solutions/covid-19.html

By Sree Rao, PMP, PgMP, PMI-ACP

Atomic Habits has been on Amazon’s top 20 most read books of the week for 167+ weeks. In his book, James Clear proposes a four-step model of habits and the four laws of behavior change:

1. Cue – Make it obvious.
2. Craving – Make it attractive.
3. Response – Make it easy.
4. Reward— Make it satisfying.

Here are a few book excerpts that form the foundation for this blog entry:

“What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.”

“Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. “

What can we take away from this? Here are three habits that I strongly recommend program managers implement. These are proven techniques that will help regardless of the type and size of the projects/programs:

Atomic Habit #1: Run regular retrospectives
Retrospectives are an excellent way to identify incremental improvements on a continual basis. Continuous improvement is also the foundational concept of Kaizen. Retrospectives are built into the Scrum methodology; however, you can use retrospectives irrespective of the methodology. Here are some steps to build this habit of running regular retrospectives:

1. Make it obvious by scheduling a recurring retrospective on your team’s calendars (biweekly, monthly or whatever cadence works for your project team).
2. Make it attractive by varying the format of the retrospectives regularly. Example: Use some fun templates for running retrospectives. There are several formats and templates that you can find on the internet.
3. Make it easy by allocating 10 minutes at the start of the retrospective to add everyone’s thoughts into the retrospective template. Identify only one improvement that is easy to implement.
4. Make it satisfying by starting off the retrospective by sharing the results of the improvement that you have implemented from the last session. Another way to make it rewarding is to add a “Thanks to…” section in the retrospective, where participants give thanks to the team members that helped them out

Atomic Habit #2: Templatize
“Templatize” as many artifacts like status reports, requirements documents, design documents and strategy documents as possible. While some leaders believe that templates limit creativity, I strongly believe that it is not the best use of our time to start everything from scratch when there are already well-established and researched templates. Creating an initial set of templates is a one-time cost with huge benefits in the long run. Get your project teams into the habit of using templates:

1. Make it obvious by creating a shared repository of all the templates and publicize the location of the templates widely. Make it part of a new project team member onboarding guide, project information resources page, etc.
2. Make it attractive by creating templates that are not only visually appealing, but also follow the accessibility guidelines. We don’t need to go overboard in terms of visual appeal, but ensure they meet the minimum standards for your team/company. Additionally, have an influential team member start using these templates. People form habits by imitating others, and having an influential team member using them would be a good way to get them motivated.
3. Make it easy to create the artifacts from the templates by providing as few instructions as possible. Also give them the freedom to make changes to the artifact based on the specific need without any approval process.
4. Make it satisfying by recognizing the team members that use the templates to create their artifacts. This is needed in the initial stages when the team members are getting into the habit of using the templates.

Another advice from the book is “standardize before you optimize” and this is perfectly applicable for templates. Standardize the use of templates first and based on the patterns that emerge, optimize the templates

Atomic Habit #3: Consolidate project tasks and action items
One of the challenges I have been facing has been that the action items from meetings are all over the place (Google docs, Words docs, Excel docs, etc.) and the project tasks are typically tracked in a tool (Jira, Asana, Monday.com, etc.).  Consolidating project tasks and action items would greatly simplify tracking both for the PM and the team. Here is a suggestion to get the team into the habit of adding action items to the task tracker:

1. Make it obvious by creating a specific section in the task tracking tool for tracking meeting agendas and action items. I have added a section called “weekly stand ups” in our regular project tracker and started adding agenda topics and action items there. You would have to figure out the best way to do this with the specific task-tracking tool that you use.
2. Make it attractive by using the features that the tracking tools already have for creating dashboards to show items in progress, completed, etc. Several contemporary task-tracking tools have the ability to create very attractive dashboards.
3. Make it easy by using existing tools and creating a section in the same task tracker so that the team has one place to check all their tasks and action items.
4. Make it satisfying by recognizing and acknowledging the completed action items and tasks. Send out weekly reports. Recognize team members that diligently use the tracker.

In summary, here are my top three atomic habits that you can cultivate amongst your project/program teams for success over the long term:

1. Run regular retrospectives
2. Templatize
3. Consolidate project tasks and action items

I would love to hear the habits that have helped you as a program manager. Share them in the comments below!

By Peter Tarhanidis, PhD

Technology has demonstrated tremendous benefits and efficiencies (many of them unstated) over time. The technology lifecyle enhancements that started with our initial computers, software programs and the internet of the past have given way to the modern-day cloud, Big Data and artificial intelligence.

Throughout this maturing landscape, technology has affected all industries—especially how we collaborate. According to Peng (2021), here are some key impacts to consider:

• Digital transformations spending will exceed an estimated $2.39 trillion by 2024.
• Collaborative tools and technologies increased operational efficiency by 131%.
• Technology will displace an estimated 85 million jobs globally by 2025.
• AI augmentation will increase global worker productivity hours to an estimated 6.2 billion hours.

Project management has benefitted from the overall technology lifecycle, either by implementing aspects of it or by being a user of its collaboration outputs. Yet project managers are at the doorstep of being part of the next wave of AI disruption.

What a PM organization must consider is the methods and concepts used in managing past programs and become proactive in shifting to an AI-enabled PM organization. There is no doubt that the role of PMs and our methodology will be augmented with AI-enabled assistance.

PwC identified five areas of AI disruption and decision making in project management:

1. Business insights: Filter data to gain actionable perceptions
2. Risk management: Develop the ability to run multiple risk scenarios and outcomes
3. Human capital: Optimize teams and leverage staff skills or new areas of training
4. Action-taker: Provide analysis and optimization of schedules and staffing needs
5. Active assistant: Augment the collection process of information to generate progress reports

To prepare for these changes, project managers should:

• Invest in data sciences and digital skill sets
• Create a culture that adopts digital disruption
• Enable the use of digital tools and approaches to limit manual efforts and drive value-added work.

In order for these changes to emerge, there are a few considerations that may hold one back from the changes—such as organizational readiness, employee skills assessments, and the state of technical tools.

PwC outlines a change approach to assist in the transition that relies on updating project management strategy, leveraging technology investments, integrating digital and AI, and a comprehensive communication plan to generate awareness through adoption by the future project management workforce.

What other approaches have you used—or should be considered—to manage AI disruption in project management?

Reference:

1. https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/publications/documents/virtual-partnership-artificial-ntelligence-disrupt-project-management-change-role-project-managers-final.pdf
2. https://writersblocklive.com/blog/technology-in-the-workplace-statistics/

By Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D., M.B.A.

Today, developments in emerging technology, business processes and digital experiences are accelerating larger transformation initiatives. Moore’s Law means that we have access to exponentially better computing capabilities. Growth is further fueled by technologies such as supercomputers, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Internet of Things (IoT) and more across industries.

Emerging Tech
The global IT industry is valued at $5.3 trillion in 2020 and is poised to grow 6.2 percent by 2021, according to tech market research firm IDC. Emerging technology like augmented reality and robotics will make up an increasing share of that growth.

Business Process Maturity
Organizations are improving the maturity of their business processes. They’re doing this by automating tasks, eliminating them, improving performance or finding the lowest-cost way to perform a task. Organizations are connecting with experts to collaborate across a wider network of colleagues. This enables strategies to be integrated across the value chain to quickly drive business outcomes.

According to market research group IMARC, automation and the IoT are driving growth in business process management (BPM); the BPM market is expected to grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate between 2020 and 2025.

Customer Experience
In addition, having a formidable customer experience strategy can make the difference between customers choosing your brand or your competitors in 2020. That’s according to Core dna, a digital experience platform vendor.

Customer experience is redefining business processes and digitizing the consumption model to increase brand equity. Gartner reports that among marketing leaders who are responsible for customer experience, 81 percent say their companies will largely compete on customer experience in two years. However, only 22 percent have developed experiences that exceed customer expectations.

Economic Forces
Lastly, the potential for cash flow growth remains high in 2020, despite economic risks, according to the U.S. Corporate Credit Outlook 2020. This will likely lead to capital investments and a fair portion of companies funding transformational projects.

The Way Forward
While transformations have evolved, they encapsulate the way we think and operate. Old methods may seem encumbering and administratively difficult, creating bureaucracy and delays in decision making. The challenge is the velocity of change, which is very disruptive to organizations.

I’ve developed a few guidelines to help navigate this change:

• Work with an agile mindset.
• Fail often and fast to ultimately filter out winning initiatives.
• Define the cultural attributes that propel staff and colleagues to succeed on their endeavors.

Change is now inherent and pervasive in the annual planning process for organizations. Given that, I like to ask: What is the plan to prepare staff and colleagues to compete in this hyper-transformation age?

What observations have you made to keep up with this new era’s velocity of change?