I wish I had me when I was you...

The bottom line on tools is this…if you aren’t using it as it was designed and/or have chosen to customize it so that it barely looks like what you started with, you are slowly going to degrade the functionality and usefulness of this tool to the point that it will lose the ability to give you good quality information you can rely on.  All of the major tools companies out there claim to solve many of the basic project management objectives, but for the more advanced users, one tool isn’t going to be perfect for you no matter how much you customize.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen what can happen when companies look to make the tool fit their process instead of considering that the other way around might actually be more effective.  This doesn’t apply just to project/portfolio management software, as many of you realize.  People will take that bright and shiny tool out of the box and transform it into something that they swear they needed in order to get any value from the tool.  Then, years go by, and you’ve put so many customizations on top of the tool that it is barely recognizable as that off the shelf product you purchased many years prior.  The vendor will be telling you that you can get so many of those customized features in their newer version of the software.  You are finding that you need to put fix on top of fix to get the software to work the way you had hoped three changes ago.  The executives in your organization don’t see the real business value in the tool (where are their fancy dashboards with reliable data?), so you are having a hard time convincing them to invest another hefty sum of money in upgrading or replacing the tool.  Any of this sound familiar?

Assuming you can convince leadership to invest in replacing the tool or for those of you that are making the investment for the first time, below are some recommendations for getting it right.

Your best bet is to start with the best future in mind, not your current state.  What is it that you are hoping to produce as an ultimate outcome of using this tool?  Is your focus resource management?  Is it cost management?  Is it fancy dashboards that the executives can use?  Figure out what matters to you, as the owner of the tool, and also to your stakeholders.  It is in your best interest to take the time to figure out what each of your stakeholder groups needs in order to feel a part of the process and to make sure that they are getting real, tangible value from the tool.  Otherwise, you will have a disaster on your hands when you implement something (customized or not) that doesn’t meet stakeholder needs. No one will use it, or if forced, they will find the path of least resistance, which equals least amount of valuable information.

In addition to gathering requirements from stakeholders (Software Development 101, right?), you also need to take the clean sheet of paper perspective for your processes.  Put aside what your tools or processes do for you today and think about what you ultimately want to deliver.  Once you’ve done that, you may realize that your current business processes don’t actually fit where you are headed with your new set of requirements.  That’s OK.  Change can be your friend here.  You can either scrap all of your old processes in favor of your new ones or take advantage of this opportunity to align new business requirements with some of the lean and six sigma strategies for process improvement applied to your existing processes.  Either way, you are still only looking at requirements and the processes.  The tool doesn’t yet come into the picture.  There is a reason for this.  If you engage with vendors before you’ve done your homework, you will have them all “helping” you define your business processes in a way that suits their tool, specifically.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you need to get into very specific details of your processes before tool selection, but you need to know what you want.  Figure that out and then you can be clear with vendors about what you want when you engage with them.  The more you know about what you want as an outcome, the more the vendor can help you achieve success.  The vendor will be able to tell you how to best achieve your desired outcomes with the tool they are pitching and they will be able to make some best practice recommendations to your processes to get to the most efficient results.   That’s a very different role than having them define all of your processes for you, some of which will only be there because that’s how their tool works instead of what you actually need to run your function.

Upon reaching agreement on the business requirements and business process, it’s time to start looking at your tool options.  Vendors will fall all over themselves to help you with your project management software needs.  There are the primary companies that create the software and then there are third party implementers that will implement the software of your choosing.  Your best bet is to do your research here and look at what other companies of your size are using.  This is easy enough.  Google searches and actual conversations with people will get you everything you need.  There will be many war stories from companies that have implemented the software packages or web based/Saas model tools.  Some will be great, but more will not be so great.  Some people will claim that a certain tool is amazing and others will say that that same tool is horrible.  Neither of them is right and both of them are right.  It’s all about the experience that they had in implementing and using the tool in their organization, how much they customized the tool, and what they were looking for as outcomes.  My experience has been that those that didn’t follow the suggestions in this article will have the worst experiences to share with you.

There is one very important consideration with all of this and that is that you must keep the people engaged in the process of defining the requirements and get real agreement to engage in the use of the tool once it is implemented.  The primary reason that a project management tool is put into place is to help in managing and leveraging the project data to make decisions.  Those reports that you and your executives want will only be as good as the data put into the tool by the project resources.  Bad data in equals bad data out.  Do not underestimate the time and effort required to educate, train, and build structure around the users of this tool and how they interact with this tool.  This user management process will be an ongoing communication and training effort that must be planned for when considering implementing project management software.

One final note…

No tool will be perfect.  Pick the one that most closely aligns with your already defined objectives and key business processes.  My advice…use the 80/20 Rule.  Expect the tool to meet 80% of your needs through no customization (even if this means modifying your processes to meet the tool instead of the other way around) and then look to make modest customizations or find mechanisms outside of the tool to meet your last 20%.  Any more than that and you will be paying for it for years to come!

In my mind, there is a difference between implementation methodology and project management discipline.  They can work together quite seamlessly, but aren’t the same thing.  Looking at the PMI Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®), you will see the various “Whats” that need to be considered as a project manager.  Those “Whats” are the knowledge areas and are primarily focused on the things the project manager must do, from the perspective of the project manager. As with any methodology, you should look at it as a toolbox of potential tools that you can pull out to accomplish a task.  You don’t need every tool, all of the time.  However, to be successful, you have to know which tools are at your disposal and when and how to use them.  As a 10 year PMP, I can say that I highly recommend becoming familiar with these “Whats” of portfolio, program, and project management via the PMBOKs.

As far as the “Hows” of getting projects done, there are many different implementation methodologies you can choose from for your organization.  Implementation methodologies are focused significantly on the building part of a project, where the sausage is made, if you will.  Agile, SDLC, Spiral, Waterfall, etc. all look at the roles for each of the players on the team and how they must all engage for the work to get accomplished.  Each of these implementation methodologies has strengths and gaps in ability to help you manage your projects.

As with project management discipline, look at the various implementation methodologies as options you can choose from to accomplish your priorities.  Some require more rigor and discipline in applying the components than others, but all are aimed at getting your projects completed, while balancing the triple constraint.

Now, let’s take this to the entire portfolio level.  As PMO leaders, we need to be mindful that a key to our success is being able to build trust with our business partners.  To do this, we need to build highly reliable techniques for managing our portfolio of work so that we can deliver consistently.  Doing what you say you are going to do, on a regular basis, will show your customers and business partners that they can count on you.  It’s that simple.

So, how do you maximize your available resource capacity and throughput on projects to get to a high quality and optimally delivered portfolio?  To answer that, let’s look at a methodology that leverages the pros of a few different implementation methodologies in a way that creates hyper-productive teams and significantly increases your total portfolio success.

I’ve personally seen the details of this framework, attended the full day workshop and feel that this guy is really onto something big.  As stated above, having all of the best tools at your disposal and knowing when and how to use them, is one of the tops strength for project managers.  Now, take that a step further and leverage those components in such a way that your entire portfolio is optimized and you’ve hit the sweet spot for PMO leaders.  You have fully leveraged the “Whats” and the “Hows” to maximize your entire portfolio throughput.

ACCLAIM™ is a portfolio management approach based primarily on Critical Chain Project Management, with some project-level methods borrowed from Agile and Lean.  It stands for Advanced Critical Chain Lean Agile IT Management.  This methodology takes 6 proven techniques for dramatically improving the throughput and reliability of IT Project Portfolios, and introduces a 7^th technique that allows both Agile and non-Agile projects to co-exist harmoniously within the same portfolio.  ACCLAIM is focused on addressing the three primary objectives of any IT PMO:

1)      Get more done (improve throughput of project completions)

2)      Get it done reliably (minimize risk of project failure)

3)      Use the right tool for the job (apply Agile when it makes sense, and other methods when they make sense)

Four of the techniques—Project Staggering, Single Tasking, Elimination of Task-Level Commitments, and Lean—are designed in combination to boost the throughput of project completions by as much as 8x, while boosting reliability.

Two of the techniques—Project Buffering and Buffer Management—are designed to maximize the probability that all projects in the portfolio are completed within the original budget, schedule, and scope.

The last technique—Time-Based Buffering—converts Agile’s scope buffers into time-based buffers, offering an “apples-to-apples” view of all project buffers in the portfolio.

Finding a methodology that works for you is highly dependent upon your environment, culture, aptitude of the staff expected to use it, and the organizational appetite for standardized process.   With that said, there are ways to maximize your entire portfolio so that your PMO becomes a trusted partner in delivering the results that the organizational leaders need.

Identify Your Organizational Appetite and Needs

This article will look at a few of the most common mistakes PMO leaders make when setting up or evolving a PMO.

Mistake #1: Assuming your organization needs a PMO without identifying the business priorities.

What Works:

The first step is asking yourself a few fundamental questions to determine where your PMO can provide value.  What does your PMO solve?  Are leaders concerned about time to market?  Is it brand and industry reputation?  Is technology costing too much to implement?  These business challenges should be easily accessible to you by reviewing the mission and objectives for the organization and paying attention to what’s going on around you.  The leaders of the organization, once they trust you, will tell you what’s really going on.  If it’s a public company, do your research.  You will find someone talking about what is or isn’t working with the company from the outside, as well as the inside.  Chances are high that this is what the CEO is thinking about.  Find a way to tie what you are doing to solving those pain points and you will have a reason why your PMO needs to exist.

Knowing the business challenges is only half of the battle.  You can’t ignore the politics that are circulating at those upper levels.  Understanding what motivates those business leaders will help you secure your PMO’s position.  Those senior leaders are still human and just like we discuss below regarding the people within the various levels of the organization, each leader has their own personal motivators that will color how they see you as either an asset or a threat to their success.  Pay attention to the clues and figure out who you can trust to fill you in on the way business really operates at that level.  Yes, it can be as simple as learning that they will help you if you make them look good.  We may not like it, but ignoring it can be detrimental to your PMO survival.   More on this when we get to driving real change in the organization and real change leadership in future articles.

Mistake #2: Spending too little time on the people within the organization, as advocates for future success.

What Works: 

Take the time to get to know the organizational culture and appetite for a PMO.  Every organization has people in it that will resent what the PMO represents – more structure and oversight to what they do.  As will be mentioned many times in this article series, the first thing you need to do is figure out the three categories of people you need to identify in an organization – those that love you, those that hate you, and those that don’t care.

Once you have placed the people into their categories, spend some time working with people from all three categories to learn where their pain points are and both what they want from the PMO and what they fear most.  Never start with a hard sell for any of these categories.  You have to start by giving them the solid and honest impression that you want to solve their challenges and make life easier for them.  If you can’t find that, you can’t be successful.  Your promoters will lose interest and your detractors will make your life miserable, all while the indifferent people go along acting like you don’t exist.  Warning:  Those indifferent people are just as dangerous as those that are detracting from your success!

If you’re lucky, the people that don’t want you around can be pulled into the process to have their voices heard.  Keep your enemies close…and talking…to you, not leadership, about what concerns them.  You can do this by inviting them to participate in an advisory group you create to hear varied opinions.  Engage them to help you identify the problems with the PMO and then ask them what they would do to solve those challenges.  If you are building or transforming the PMO, even better!  They get to help with the transformation.  Before you know it, you have turned those detractors into what?  Active participants in helping you build a PMO powerhouse that has a full range of supporters in the organization.  There’s nothing like engaging someone in the process to help them own the future state of a PMO.

Mistake #3: Deciding what kind of PMO will work for your organization without doing A LOT of homework. 

What works:

There are many different types of PMO models, all of them with benefits and weaknesses.  Familiarize yourself with the various structures out there (PMI – http://www.pmi.org and CEB –http://www.executiveboard.com are great sources for that information) and figure out WHAT you are trying to solve before you even attempt to decide HOW to build your PMO.  Hopefully, you have figured out the business problems facing your organization and have combined that with the knowledge of the organizational appetite and people readiness from the prior section.  From those clues, you can determine where the center of gravity for change will need to be located.  Is your organization more silo-like where each business unit runs independently? If so, your best bet will likely be a decentralized model where each business unit has its own smaller PMO.  In this case, your organization would likely still benefit from some standardization of templates, best practices, learning and development, tools, etc. from a leaner enterprise level PMO.  Do you have major cross functional initiatives taking place that require coordination across the business units?  If so, you may benefit from a centralized group of strategic change agents that can run the programs that cross the enterprise.    In an upcoming article, I will explore many of the popular PMO types and the pros and cons I’ve seen in my many years of experience building various PMOs.

Great!  So, you have been charged with building and running a PMO for your organization.  You’ve got the tools, you know about the best practices, and you have templates coming out of your ears.  Now what?  What are the things that you must do to help your PMO grow into a change management powerhouse for your company?

In this series of articles, we will explore both the art and science of what makes PMOs a market differentiator to strategy realization.  Many of us are aware of the fundamental building blocks necessary to create a successful PMO.  The science of PMO management covers the standards and best practices, as well as, the tools that must be present at the foundation of a PMO.  What many struggle with, however, is the art of a great PMO.  This is where organizational savvy, strong talent management and strategic change leadership come into play.  These are the art forms that make a PMO an effective and sustainable entity in any organization.

This journey will cover those basic building blocks that set the PMO stage for success, pointing to several of the proven tools and techniques for effective portfolio, program, and project management.  Following that overview, the real fun begins in exploring the lessons learned from great leaders on the ways to drive real transformational change through an effective PMO.  This is the art of PMO performance.

The articles will be as follows:

1. Determining the Type of PMO for Your Organization: Identify Your Organizational Appetite and Needs
2. The Low Down on the Methodologies and Maximizing Your Portfolio Throughput: What is Implementation Methodology vs. Project Management?  What’s New in Portfolio Level Methodology?
3. Which Tools Make a Difference: Do Some Tools Have a Proven Success Over Others?
4. The PMO Talent Profile: Why Getting the Right Talent Matters
5. Successful Change Leadership: Creating Change Advocacy in Your Organization
6. Alignment with What Matters: Driving Real Change Across an Enterprise

On January 16, 2017, Martin Luther King Day, a national day of service, over 250 project management volunteers came together to help launch over 50 critical nonprofit initiatives spanning three major metropolitan areas—Washington, DC, New York, NY, and Norfolk, VA—for the 3rd annual Project Management Day of Service (PMDoS®). PMDoS, the signature event of the nonprofit Project Management for Change, is a community outreach event of unprecedented scale enabling pro-bono Project Management services for nonprofits and social-change organizations.

Keynoting the event was Ms. Wendy Spencer, CEO of the Corporation for National Community Service (www.NationalService.gov), which spearheads federally funded volunteer initiatives such as Americorps.

It was an action-packed day-long session that connected seasoned project managers and subject matter experts with community nonprofit organizations whose missions are to help families, children, the arts, career development, military, veterans, and those providing legal aid. Each of the nonprofit organizations received nearly $2,000 in consulting services at no fee, and which helped generate an estimated $600,000 in benefit to the community.

During these high impact consultation sessions, a team of 3-4 project management subject matter experts met with representatives of the participating nonprofits to review prepared “problem statements.” They identified potential roadblocks, developed clearly defined scope statements and created actionable, customized project plans that will serve as blueprints for business sustainability.

“Project Management is the only profession whose sole purpose is to drive high-impact improvements in our world, yet so many worthy causes simply lack the resources to bring PM discipline into practice; PMDoS changes that, and does so on a global scale—a true ‘force-multiplier’ for accelerating social good,” said Michael Hannan, board member of Project Management for Change. Fellow board member Marcus Parker went further, adding, “We heard testimonials from dozens of nonprofits and volunteers that this year’s PMDoS delivered more positive impact to our veterans, to helping sick children, and to so many other great causes—it was so moving to see so many people come together to deliver so much value to the community.”
Sponsors supporting PMDoS 2017 include Microsoft, CharityEngine, the University of Maryland Project Management Center of Excellence, LeanKit, five local chapters of the Project Management Institute, and over a dozen small and medium-sized businesses and educational institutions.

ABOUT PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR CHANGE
Project Management for Change is a 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to raise the profile of the Project Management profession by creating a positive impact in our community.

Project Management for Change recruits volunteer project managers to donate their time and attention to serve those who help others. Our signature event, PMDoS, is a substantive, high-impact way for project managers to give back to the community using their hard-earned project management skills.

Join us in changing the world, one project at a time!
For more information, visit PM4Change, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.