The Professional Project Manager

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, organizational success is not just about meeting targets—it's about excelling in project, program, and portfolio management (P3M). A comprehensive understanding of your organization’s P3M maturity can be a game-changer. This is where a Portfolio, Programme, and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3^®) assessment becomes invaluable. I have personally seen (and assisted) organisations go from low performing to high performing by completing a P3M3^® assessment and following the prioritized improvement recommendations that are central to it.

The Transformative Impact of P3M3^® Assessments

A P3M3^® assessment provides a structured framework to understand, evaluate, and enhance your organization's project management capabilities. The insights gained from this assessment are pivotal in:

1. Identifying Improvement Areas: Uncover hidden inefficiencies and areas needing refinement in your organization's project management processes.
2. Focussing on Existing Strengths: The assessment is not a punitive exercise but instead seeks to uncover what is working well and make sure you do more of this.
3. Enhancing Decision-Making: Equip your leadership with the data they need to make informed decisions, elevating the effectiveness of governance and resource allocation.
4. Boosting Project Success Rates: Ultimately, the purpose of the P3M3^® assessment is to improve the predictability and performance of your projects, leading to more consistent success (however you define it) and assisting your organisation achieve its strategic goals.

Why Opt for a Virtual P3M3^® Assessment?

In the digital age, virtual assessments have proven to be not only feasible but highly efficient. Conducting a P3M3^® assessment virtually offers several compelling advantages:

• Flexibility and Convenience: Adjust the assessment schedule to suit your organization's busy calendar, without the need for physical meetings. The data and evidence reviews, the workshops and interviews, and presentations involved in the assessment can be completed virtually so you can engage a certified P3M3^® Assessor from anywhere in the world.
• Cost-Effectiveness: The virtual option also saves on travel and accommodation expenses typically associated with in-person assessments.
• Rapid Implementation: By choosing a virtual option you get quicker assessment kick-off, setup and completion which mean faster access to valuable insights.

Achieving a high level of P3M maturity is a testament to an organization’s commitment to excellence. It’s a badge of honor, showcasing a culture that values continuous improvement and professional growth. By engaging in a P3M3^® assessment, you’re not just contributing to the success of your projects; you're uplifting the entire organization. This commitment reflects your dedication to excellence, a quality that resonates across all levels of the organization.

While the idea of conducting a P3M3^® assessment is appealing, the expertise required to do so effectively is crucial. Seeking a certified, authorised, knowledgeable and experienced professional to guide you through the process can make a significant difference. AXELOS makes a great deal of effort to ensure only the best organisations can become an AXELOS Consulting partner (ACP), and only people trained and certified can be a Certified P3M3^® Assessor. An expert with a nuanced understanding of virtual assessments can tailor the process to your organization's unique needs, ensuring that the results are both relevant and actionable.

In considering your options for a P3M3^® assessment facilitator, it's beneficial to select someone who is not just a certified and authorised assessor, but someone with a broad range of experience so that the prioritized recommendations they provide for improvement are based on what actually works and not just theory. An individual who combines profound knowledge with a flexible, virtual-first approach can provide a seamless and effective assessment experience.

Embarking on a P3M3^® assessment journey is a strategic step towards organizational maturity and success. By opting for a virtual assessment, you embrace innovation and efficiency, positioning your organization to thrive in a competitive business environment. Remember, the right expertise can turn this journey into a transformative experience, paving the way for sustained excellence and pride in your organizational achievements.

Find out more about the P3M3^® assessment at https://www.axelos.com/for-organizations/p3m3

And let me know if you have any questions, always happy to chat.

Sean Whitaker

[email protected]

And yes, in terms of full disclosure I am a certified P3M3 assessor and my company is a Authorized Consulting Partner (ACP) but this isn't a pitch for work. Its a genuine piece of advice to help you and your organisation improve your portfolio, programme, and project management quickly with a proven, effective, and cost efficient method for doing so.

As a consultant who works with organizations around the globe, I get to see many forms of a PMO and I get to see what works and what doesn’t.  A well thought out and value adding PMO can add measurable strategic and operational value to any organisation regardless of its size or maturity. Getting the right PMO for your organization can be a challenge and I want to share with you some thoughts and observations on what exactly a PMO can be. Hopefully from these thoughts you can take some tips on what your PMO should be.

Let’s start with what do the letters “PMO” stand for? Well the “P” can stand for Portfolio, Programme or Project. The “M” and the “O” generally stand for Management Office. You can add an “E”, for Enterprise, in the front to get an EPMO to indicate it stretches across the entire organization. You can have individual PMO’s that answer into an EPMO. It can even not be called a PMO at all, and there are many other names it can go by. You can call it what you want as long as the name is an accurate representation of what the function actually does.

Answering the question about what a PMO can be takes a bit more time. It is not a single standard format you can apply to your organization which makes it a little hard to define appropriately. The easiest why I have found to describe, at a high level, what a PMO is, is that it should be the center of excellence, whatever that means, for professional project management in your organisation to support the current and future portfolio, program and project management aspirations of the organisation. That is a long winded way of saying that your PMO should support what you currently do but also take you into the future and a better, more mature state.

At one end of the spectrum I have seen a very low maturity organization have a ‘PMO’ that was as small as a few ring binders with templates in it that were regularly updated. At the other end of the spectrum I have worked with large and complex PMO’s which can be a fully separate and resourced unit that does full portfolio management, strategic alignment, governance, project selection & reporting, and also employs, deploys, & trains all the project management personnel. Somewhere between these two extremes is the PMO that is right for you and your organization.

Here is a list of functions that a PMO might consider:

• Governance and sponsorship
• Developing standards, methodologies, processes, tools and templates
• Maturity improvement
• Strategic alignment
• Project selection
• Full control and reporting of all initiatives
• Assurance
• Benefits management at all levels and at all stages
• Programme management
• Allocation of project management resources
• Recruitment of project managers
• Training and development of project managers

What have I missed?

These are the types of things to consider when thinking about introducing or upgrading a PMO:

1. Maturity of your organization – a low maturity organization may want a PMO that helps it increase in maturity in specific ways, while a high maturity organization will want a PMO that supports and maintains its high level of maturity.
2. Size of your organization – larger organizations generally need a larger and better resourced PMO
3. Complexity of the work that you do – the more complex the work that you do the more complex the PMO will need to be to support your efforts
4. C-Level understanding and support – without full support from senior and executive management your PMO will never be considered a full-time part of the organisation.

Unfortunately, the research tells us that there are many threats to a PMO and its success. These include the following:

1. Making a PMO a bureaucracy
2. Not proving the value a PMO brings to the organization. The PMO, whatever its form and name, must deliver real value to the organisation, and not be afraid to tell everyone how good they are. I’ve seen great PMO’s fail because they kept their success to themselves
3. Lack of senior management support
4. Tough financial times – it seems that when finances get tight for an organization the first thing to go is the PMO
5. Trying to be everything to everyone – focus on what you do well, and just do that
6. Being under resourced and overworked and letting everyone down
7. Looking backwards at what you have accomplished and not looking forward to the value you have yet to create
8. Assuming a PMO is static – a PMO should change with the organisations needs. If your PMO is the same as it was 2 years its probably out of date.

Just a reminder, this is just a high level introduction to the PMO. There has been plenty of research done on the topic and if you are academically minded you can easily find some serous pieces of research out there on the topic. There are also many people more on projectmanagement.com who I know would love to share their experiences, both bad and good. So don’t be afraid to reach out and find out as much as you can before deciding on what sort of PMO is right for you.

In the same way that project management practitioners can be described as beginner, intermediate or advanced, organizations can also be described as having low, medium, or high levels of project management. These levels of project management reflect the level of organizational project management maturity (OPMM).  Knowing the level of OPMM your organisation is currently at, and also knowing where it should be is essential to help you reach your organisational goals and strategy through better delivery of portfolios, programmes, and projects.

An OPMM assessment will look at all aspects of the way you run portfolios, programmes and projects within the organisation including:

• Organisational Governance
• Management controls
•  
• Finance and cost estimating
• Planning and Execution
• Scheduling and time estimating
• Stakeholder management and communications
•  
• Lessons learned and information management
•  
• Risk management
• Quality management
• Practitioner capability development

A good assessment will look at all the processes and practices you have, evidence of them being used (or not), and also interview users and key stakeholders either in a workshop or face to face interviews. Once the evidence gathering is completed they can provide scores for individual business units, an organisational score (usually 0-5), benchmarking against others in the industry and a set of prioritized (and achievable) recommendations to move you towards your goal.

A good OPMM assessment provides a benchmark for your future efforts. It lets you know that you are progressing in the right areas. Without it you simply don’t know how well you are doing with your improvement efforts. It’s a good idea to commit to regular OPMM assessments every 18-24 months to check how you are progressing, and to reprioritize recommendations.

Don’t assume that all organizations must be at the top level of maturity, it’s important to consider that the level of OPMM that is desirable for any organisation is directly related to the size, cost, length, complexity and industry of the projects being undertaken. Organizations undertaking highly complex, long term, expensive projects should aim to have a higher level of project management maturity, while organizations and small businesses routinely undertaking short, low cost, low complexity projects may be perfectly suited to a lesser level of project management maturity.

Using an external consultant to assess your level of project management maturity and make recommendations has a number of benefits:

• A good consultant will make sure that your recommendations are achievable, affordable and appropriate.
• You get access to their wider experience with many organisations and their insights into best practice
• The report will be independent and objective

There are several good commercial models available in the market and the benefit of using one of these is that it allows you to more easily benchmark your organisation against others in their database.

I am experienced in using the P3M3, OPM3, HSI 4Q model and bespoke OPMM assessment models and if you have any questions about any aspect of organizational project management maturity please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback please feel free to email me.

Total Quality Management (TQM) is an accepted part of quality management and customer satisfaction in many organizations. While it has a broad range of interpretation and application, it has some consistent principles which define it.

They are:

• Everyone in the organization recognizes that quality is central to organizational success
• Everyone in the organization contributes to quality
• The organizational culture and structure is built and maintained to support TQM
• Continuous improvement is mandatory and expected

Now imagine if we moved from project management as an ad hoc, practitioner lead initiative within an organization to Total Project Management (TPM). What would this look like? Keep in mind that most organizations rely on successful delivery of projects for operational and strategic success. Additionally, for a lot of organizations the largest part of their capital budget, and sometimes their operational budget, is spent on projects of some sort. These organizations don’t question the need to have finance and human resources as essential organization wide shared services but often question the need and value of organizational project management.

Let’s start by taking those four principles of TQM and substituting project management where it currently says quality management. Here is how they look:

• Everyone in the organization recognizes that project management is central to organizational success
• Everyone in the organization contributes to project management
• The organizational culture and structure is built and maintained to support Total Project Management
• Continuous improvement is mandatory and expected

If we did print these out, embed them in the organizational culture, and let our shareholders and customers know about them we could expect to see the following:

• A Chief Project Officer (CPO) operating a C-Level
• Appropriate and tailored portfolio, program and project management methodologies
• Appropriate and tailored PMO’s
• Support for ongoing professional development for all project management practitioners
• The CEO regularly acknowledging the role project management plays in the success of the organization
• Commitment from everybody in the organization to improving the approach to project management

Overall, these changes, if done appropriately, would lead to a more mature approach to project management within the organization and ultimately more successful portfolios, programs, projects and organizations.

What do you think?

More and more research clearly indicates that organizations with a PMO deliver more successful projects than organizations without a PMO, yet that same research also tells us that a lot of organizations fail to see the benefits of a PMO, and some organizations are even getting rid of their PMO’s. They see them as an unnecessary expense rather than the investment that they actually are.

Keep in mind that PMO is not a single standardized thing - what it is will reflect the level of project management maturity, your industry and the size, complexity and duration of the projects you undertake. It may be anything from a single ring binder full of templates through to a specific part of the organization that controls all aspect of project management. The one thing that all forms of PMO have in common is that they are the center for project management excellence in the organization.

Now, we as professional project managers know that we can do our jobs much better when supported by a PMO. But how do we go about establishing one in the when top level management fails to see the benefits? How about a stealth PMO or perhaps a VPMO – the V can stand for volunteer or virtual?

Here are three simple achievable steps to creating your own stealth or virtual PMO:

1. Establish a project management users group in your organization. Invite all project managers to be part of it. Then schedule regular meetings – a good idea is 4pm on the 4^th Friday on each month, or a breakfast meeting - and supply some refreshments for people. Have a specific topic to talk about – it could be improving your change control, standardizing templates, lessons learned and updates to your project management methodology. Invite a speaker to attend to present on a particular topic. Have someone document the meeting and follow up on any agreed actions.

2. Get the project managers to take responsibility for documenting your project management methodology and then volunteering to carry out audits on each other’s projects.

3. And most importantly of all, when your do deliver successful projects attribute your success to the support you have received from the VPMO or users group or whatever it is you want to call it. Let the decision makers higher up see the value. Your goal is to get them to support not just a PMO but also professional project management within the organization so don’t be shy about blowing your own trumpet. Take care to first prove the worth of the PMO to practitioners and the organization before trying to get financial support for a more complex form of a PMO, or even a paid PMO manager position.

Remember that this stealth or virtual PMO will be your first PMO so it doesn’t have to be overly complex. The main goal is to prove its worth and get support for a more complex one.

Let me know how you go with this idea, and it you have any other suggestions for getting a PMO off the ground in your organization.