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

There are many questions you need to ask when you start a PMO. We immediately want to go to defining the services, building templates, taking on an army of PMs, and starting projects. Before we come in like gangbusters, take a few moments to ask some very fundamental questions that you may want to answer before you start defining the services and the rest of the stuff we think of when starting a PMO.

What business problem are we trying to solve?

First things first. You need to know your purpose. Before you even get into the list of services you will provide, you need a mission, a greater purpose that you are fulfilling through the PMO construct. Your mission is not to manage projects. Your mission is not to create templates and tools. Your mission is to get to outcomes that positively impact the organization you serve. To do that, you need to be very clear on the business pain points, challenges, or new opportunities that your PMO will help solve. Get crystal clear on that before you do anything else.

Oh! And whatever you do, do not assume you know what’s best for the organization. Whether you’ve been there 1 month or 20 years, you still aren’t inside the heads of the business leaders that are creating the opportunity for the PMO. Ask them. Talk to them a lot! They will eventually tell you what you need to know.

But what if I do know what’s best for them? Who cares? Not them. Sometimes we won’t take the medicine we really need until we trust that it’s really going to make us feel better. So, make them feel better first. Solve some easier to reach pain points for them to build trust. Then you can get their engagement to consider the medicine that they really need. J

How are we going to show value quickly?

Your leaders are going to invest time, money and resources in getting this PMO up and running. Even if it’s only part of a single person to start (as I know has been the case with many of you and also how I started with my first PMO in 1999), your time is still an investment that the leadership is making and they are expecting to see a result. That result has to equate to greater impact than the time/money/resources they have invested in the PMO. Therefore, your job is to figure out how you take the business problem you are trying to solve with question one and determine how you can ease the pain on your stakeholders quickly.

It may not be in the way you would have originally thought. For example, does the business area you serve have a project that is just hemorrhaging money? Get in there and help them rescue that project, and fast! Please don’t stop and say, “Wait! Let me build 15 templates first before I help this project get back on track!” Just go Get. It. Done. for them. You will build credibility and engagement – you have created advocates that will support you as you build out your PMO.

Who is my primary sponsor?

Every project should have a sponsor and the build out of your PMO is no different than any other project. The organization that sustains should have a sponsor/champion for the organization outside of the PMO leader themselves and the project to build the PMO should have a sponsor. They can be one in the same, but they need to be identified.

It’s awesome if you can have this person be the CEO or department leader for your organization. The higher up in the organization, the better. If you can’t gain interest or support from the higher ups in your organization then you probably shouldn’t be building the PMO. Go back to question one and figure out what business problem you are being asked to solve and how that impacts your stakeholders.

Who’s with me?

To keep things simple, I like to think of three types of stakeholders. The lovers, the haters and the just don’t cares.

The lovers, those are the folks that are with you. They support the PMO, they agree with what you are trying to do, and they will go out of their way to help you succeed. They are often inside the PMO, the sponsor, the PMO leader (I hope!) and those that think they can benefit from the PMO being in place and supporting their efforts.

The haters, those are the people in your organization that are very vocal about their lack of enthusiasm for the PMO. They are often the long career types that have been at the company for a long time and have seen the PMO construct come and go without ever really gaining any traction. Or, it’s been such a thorn in their side that they just can’t get behind it. If it’s the latter, you may want to go back to question one and understand how you can solve business problems for these folks to help them turn the corner. You can also work with the haters to engage them in the process. What? Why would I do that? They hate what the PMO is doing! They won’t help me.

Well, they might. The haters are at least talking to you. They are vocal and engaged in a conversation. It may not be a pleasant conversation, but it’s a conversation nonetheless. Talk to them about their concerns. Let them vent all they want about how the PMO doesn’t work. Then, hand them the white board marker and put them in front of the whiteboard and have them show you how they would fix it if they were you. Bam! Now you have them engaged in problem solving. Guess what happens when people feel like they have a stake in the outcome because they helped you “solve the problems” with the PMO?

The category of people you really need to worry about are the just don’t cares. They are the ones running around acting like your PMO doesn’t even exist. They are the ones that think they are better off without you or feel like what you are doing doesn’t impact them. And maybe it doesn’t…or maybe it should, but they are moving along nicely without you, further proving the lack of need for a PMO. Spend your energy here. Get these folks onboard or the fact that they are being “allowed” to ignore your existence will encourage others to follow suit, leading to the demise of your PMO.

How? Figure out their WIIFM (what’s in it for me) and figure it out quickly. What do they care about? What problems are they having that you could possibly solve? Don’t take on too much too fast regarding new services or making commitments, but see if you can find a way to ease the pain they are feeling. You will give them a reason to care.

Once those questions have been asked and thoroughly answered, the next set of questions you may want to consider…

1. Where will we start? Define a small customer base that you will serve. Don’t start serving every business unit in the company all at once.
2. What services will we offer (based on questions one and two above)?
3. Where will our funding come from?
4. How many phases do we want our PMO implementation to have? Please, do everyone a favor and do the build out of services in pieces. It would be awful to build out a bunch of templates and tools for services the business doesn’t actually find helpful. Start small and build credibility before building more services.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.

I welcome your feedback and insights. Please leave a comment below.

See you online!

Warmly,

When I was a keynote speaker for one of the University of Maryland Project Management symposiums, I spoke about my proven process for creating high-impact PMOs. I took a moment to get to know the audience at the beginning and asked them about what they believed the purpose was for the PMO.

As I anticipated, many of the people that were brave enough to share only echoed my fear and concern for PMOs of the future. Many of them shared their thinking on the purpose of a PMO, saying that it was there to create standards, process, templates, tools, governance, oversight, etc.

OK, so, yes, but to what end?

Then, I asked them what they thought the stakeholders for the PMO thought about the PMO in their organization. Not at all surprising, was the outpouring of answers here: overhead, process heavy, “gotcha” organization, enforcer, box checkers, “not real work”, and on and on.

Wow. That stinks, doesn’t it?

It’s not at all surprising to see that when your focus is on process, tools and best practices, your stakeholders are going to think of you and your team as “not real work”.

Why is that?

Because without the outcomes to show that using those processes, tools and best practices will create gains for the organization that it would not achieve otherwise, you are just doing “busy work”.

Creating tools, templates and process is not the purpose of the PMO. What? Sure it is, you say. Nope. It’s not. Often when I ask why the PMO is there, the answer they give is quite frankly, wrong. Templates, tools, process, best practices, standards, etc. are a means to an end, not the end itself.

YOU ARE THERE TO DRIVE BUSINESS RESULTS FOR YOUR COMPANY IN A WAY THAT GETS YOU THE HIGHEST RETURN ON INVESTMENT.

Projects are investments. The company is investing money and in return, they want to achieve a particular result. They don’t just want to break even, they want a return on that money invested. They want to achieve the business outcomes the project was undertaken to create, and in a way that it isn’t costing them more than those benefits. Think about it…why would you do a project if it was going to cost you as much as the benefit that you could possibly achieve?

If you spend all of your time, energy and resources creating tools and templates, shouting out from the mountaintops that there is a best practice here for everyone to flock to, you will quickly become an organization that is thought of as “not real work”. Why is that? Because the rest of the organization is responsible for getting to some kind of outcomes that benefit the company. And, so are you.

To be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have standard methods for getting the work done, but DO get the work done!

The PMOs of the future, and those that have been successful, are usually integrating into the mindset of the business by focusing first and foremost on the outcomes they are trying to achieve for the organization as a whole, and are not necessarily as obsessed with how many templates they have in their library.

Keep your eye on the ball of what work needs to get accomplished and how your team is going about accomplishing that work. Are they spending 50% of their time filling out templates people aren’t ever looking at again? Then you may want to reconsider the direction you are giving them. It’s OK, no, it’s mandatory to spend time on the right level of documentation. How else are you going to effectively communicate (and have for reference later) what is agreed to, how you are progressing, etc.? What I’m talking about it making sure that the efforts are high impact – that every bit of time spent on defining process, leveraging tools, and filling out templates can be directly linked to the work of the project and is required to move the ball further down the field.

Also, it’s prudent and crucial to your sustainability of a PMO to make sure you are showing that value you are creating in some sort of metrics. While there are countless metrics out there (stay tuned to an upcoming article to read more about which metrics are good to start with in your PMO), I suggest keeping it very simple. How long did projects take before the PMO started providing support and how long do they take now? How have we increased project team member productivity? How have we helped increase project throughput across the portfolio? How much money have we saved the organization by making timely decisions or turning around issues more quickly or managing risks more effectively? You get the idea.

Notice what’s missing from that list of examples…I didn’t say how many tools we have created, the number of templates in our library, or the list of procedures we must follow to get a project started or request PMO support. No one wants to hear about those numbers unless you are streamlining, reducing, or optimizing any of those items above so people can get to the business of getting the work done.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.

I welcome your feedback and insights. Please leave a comment below.

See you online!

Warmly,

While some people may not have heard the term “boil the ocean,” most have heard of the KISS principle, most notably coined by the U.S. Navy in 1960 as “keep it simple, stupid.”  The idea was don’t over-complicate things unnecessarily. Keep your approach and your methods simple. Makes sense to me, I’m all about simple is better!

I say, “Don’t boil the ocean” or even sometimes if we really want to take on a big effort, “We don’t need to boil the ocean. Just put one pot on the stove at a time.”  Now, many people use the term boil the ocean to mean, trying to do something that is impossible. You can’t actually boil the ocean, silly!

OK, fine. But I don’t really mind taking on the impossible. In fact, if you know me, you may know about my nonprofit Project Management for Change, where we live in the world of making the impossible possible. We do it regularly through our service to the nonprofit community. As an aside, we run these big events with all volunteers to help further the high-impact and mission critical objectives of the nonprofits in our communities using our Project Management skills and have been doing it in ways that “everyone” said was impossible. To that, we said nonsense and have been going on to change the world, one project at a time, ever since. J I encourage you to check out our work if you are interested in being high impact through Project Management.

OK, back to the point of this article. I don’t mind taking on the impossible. I don’t really believe in the word can’t and think that there is always away to make something work. I don’t get scared with big projects or complicated initiatives. I think it’s all great as long as we believe the return on investment is there and the cause/mission/objective is a worthy one. In fact, many of the projects we are faced with running or PMOs we are trying to create feel like we are attempting the impossible, but we gotta do them. What I don’t like and feel is setting yourself up for failure is taking on too much, too fast. When we attempt to “boil the ocean,” we are allowing ourselves to get carried away in a really big effort that is doomed from the start.

Why is that?

Because big things are really, really hard to do well.

What do I mean?

Let’s say you are building a PMO (but you can insert any big and complex project here – building a PMO is a project). You decide you want to build out templates, tools, processes, standards for the organization to follow, portfolio management and governance, a staff of project/program managers, and maybe even a coaching and training group to further the awareness and knowledge of project/program management in your organization.

What’s wrong with that? Nothing. Unless you try to do it all at once. Trust me here. I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.

Here’s why. When you start building a PMO, you can get “thanksgiving eyes” like I have in the past and try to serve all of the needs, of all of your stakeholders, all at once. Think about it. You’ve been given this new role and you have so many different business groups that you are trying to get to engage with your PMO, as you build credibility. On top of that, if you have been taught that the customer is always right, you have to say yes to all of their different needs, right? Wrong.

If you say yes to everything and try to start building it all at once, a few things will happen.

1) You will take too long to have impact and show value. The business leaders you serve are all watching you to see if you are going to get this right, if you are going to be successful. They are testing you. Even the ones that like you are still waiting to see how you do with this. Because people have what I think is an ever-decreasing attention span, PMOs (and their leaders) do not have the luxury of waiting 2 years to meet the intended objectives, which are presumably to further the business and have a positive impact. If you take too long to start showing impact and a return on their investment, you are likely to find business leaders that get what I refer to as “something shiny syndrome” and move on to the next idea they think will help them get their objectives accomplished. Your window is short here to show value. Don’t squander your time by building big things first.

2) You will likely take in too many conflicting sources of guidance. I have had the pleasure of working in organizations that truly valued relationships OVER productivity. (Yes, they actually told me that.) So, I HAD to get input and feedback from every major leader in the company so they could all “put their stamp” on the PMO I was building, giving it their blessing, telling me how it should be built and run, and what they needed from the PMO. Well, that lead to a ton of conflicting data and needs I had to try to address and, of course, everyone’s needs were all number one priority. Ugh. I felt like I had no choice but to say, “Yes, we can do that!” They called it collaboration, but I called it insanity. At least it was driving me to the brink of insanity. It’s a no win situation when everyone’s opinions count and count equally.

3) You will lose credibility. You begin by saying yes to some things and then a few more and on top of that, you have people making up their own ideas about what you should do, developing their own expectations, and even speaking on your behalf about what you will accomplish. You aren’t even aware of all of the expectations running around out there about what your PMO will do. Heck, for some, it’s here to save the world, for others it won’t ever work, and then others have that laundry list of things it will solve for them. Some of those things on their list might not even be on your list, but you won’t even know it! You are failing before you ever start!

4) Big is complicated and messy. Now, notice I didn’t say impossible, but complicated and messy, for sure. It’s just harder to do big complicated things. The harder and more complex something is, the more risks associated with the process, the bigger the issues you are likely to face, the more it costs to do, the more people you have to get involved and on and on. Why make it hard when it doesn’t have to be?

5) You could get it wrong. What if what you think the PMO should do is not actually what the organization needs? Yeah, I know, they told you they needed that, but it turns out they didn’t need that, but they needed this instead. You could spend months or years building something that it turns out isn’t really going to get the return on investment or help the organization have the impact it needs to have and all of that time is now gone.

There are many other reasons that boiling the ocean isn’t such a great idea, but I think you get the point.

So what do you do?

Just put one pot on the stove to boil at a time.

By starting with something simple, you may find out that you didn’t need the whole ocean to begin with OR at the very least, you can at least get some wins early.

1) Prioritize. It’s ok to get input from the entirety of your stakeholder group, but then you must prioritize the work and services that your team is going to take on. Start with the services that you think will yield the highest “happy factor” for your business leaders, whether that’s providing coaching services to PMs all over the organization, setting up some basic templates, or finally giving them a basic view into all of the projects in the company.

2) Set expectations. In order to avoid losing credibility before you ever have a chance to be successful, once you have prioritized, be clear about what services you are going to provide, when you will provide them, and then provide detailed “this is how it will work” explanations to your stakeholders. People will fill in the blanks with their own definitions and ideas of what your PMO will do, what the services should be, and how they should operate in the absence of information. Don’t allow that. Be clear about who, what, when, where, how and why you are doing what you are doing, so they know what to expect from you.

3) Build a WBS (and make it a project). Make the big not so big by breaking down the body of work into pieces that you can accomplish in a very short period of time. Then, put it in a schedule and manage it like you would any other project. In fact, you should be the sponsor, as the PMO leader and have a PM specifically assigned to the “building the PMO” project. That allows you to be the barrier remover and ultimately accountable for the outcomes and success. You can also use the ultimate business leader that championed the PMO as your sponsor if that makes the most sense politically in your organization to get the support you need (and encourage sustained engagement). Just make sure to take a look at our blog posts on sponsor management to get ideas for making that work!

5) Show wins early. The faster you can solve a problem for your business leaders, the faster your credibility rises as a solution to the company’s problems, not simply overhead. Wins give you more time and space to create more wins and then more.

5) Think Agile. Iterate. Start simple and develop pilot programs or services for your stakeholders. Call an initial roll out of a service a “pilot program” and let a group of stakeholders be a part of helping you design the best way to provide that service. People don’t expect to see perfection in a pilot and they know that they have to be a part of the solution improvement process. Perfect. Those that sign up to be the early adopters are your change agents you will use as champions later on to bring on other business leaders and groups. The fact that you included them in the pilot and incorporated their feedback means they will “own” the solution with you. The perfect champions and advocates for your PMO!

6) Repeat these steps for every service and deliverable you create. You don’t need to have a very complicated portfolio management process to start, just give them a list of their projects so they can see what the heck is going on. You don’t have to have 10 PMs on the team to start managing some of the initiatives, just get a few really good ones to build credibility. You don’t have to take on every business unit in the company day one, just pilot one or two business areas at a time to learn the ropes and build out your approach. You get the idea.

I hope this gives you a few ideas to maintain your sanity and make the daunting task of starting a PMO (or running any change effort) a little less overwhelming. Oh, and if you need more, write to us! We respond to all of our messages and make sure that none of you are left not knowing where to get help. We have to stick together out there! 

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.

I welcome your feedback and insights. Please leave a comment below.

See you online!

Warmly,

OK, I know this one is going to create a stir in the social atmosphere and that gives me a bit of a smirk on my face. Why? Because it’s time for project managers and PMO leaders to wake up and pay attention to what the business has to say.

What is EVM?

According to Wikipedia,

“Earned value management is a project management technique for measuring project performance and progress. It has the ability to combine measurements of the project management triangle:

* Scope

* Time

* Costs

In a single integrated system, Earned Value Management is able to provide accurate forecasts of project performance problems, which is an important contribution for project management.”

EVM is about measuring schedule and cost performance of a project. OK, that’s good, but it only measures the performance of the project, not the outcomes that the project was intended to create. That’s the problem. EVM alone cannot tell your business leaders if they are going to achieve high-impact business outcomes for the work that was done, only if that work will be done according to what you expect.

Now, before the methodology zealots start blasting me (which they tend to do before reading the whole article), let me clarify. EVM is a good tool. It’s a great resource for measuring project performance, and one that I encourage you to study and apply, but that’s not all we need to be measuring. We need to start measuring return on investment of our projects, and the likelihood of that return being achieved throughout the life-cycle of the project, if we want to actually prove our worth as project managers and PMO leaders. It’s about getting to strong outcomes, not just breaking even.

Let me put this into some real life scenarios …

Imagine we are talking about your retirement savings plan. You make investments and you expect those investments to grow through earnings so that the money you are putting away plus those earnings can help you afford to eventually retire.

OK, so let’s say you diligently put money into this plan through every paycheck and then your retirement plan manager comes to you and says, “Well, we spent all of your money and we need more money.” What? You spent all of my money? (At least that’s what I would be saying!) The manager keeps saying they will take care of your investments, you will get a big return in the future, and so you keep putting in more money. You can count on your fingers and toes the number of times you heard, “promise, this is the last time”.

That goes on and on over the years and you are now ready to retire (a.k.a. your project is now complete). It’s time to reap all of the rewards of your investments that were promised to you and it turns out there aren’t any. You can’t retire. The money was thrown into risky investments that were not well managed and you have no savings (a.k.a. the high risk project that completed without delivering any of the benefit outcomes expected {like a system that is built but no one ever uses it} – all loss, no gain). You’d be pretty upset, wouldn’t you? Ask the victims of the last financial crash how they felt when looking at their retirement plans, I’m sure they will tell you. It wasn’t pretty. That’s how your business leaders feel when they look at all of this money spent on poorly managed projects that never complete. Money down the drain.

What’s the EVM situation here? Well, that all depends. Did you put in the money you thought you would? If you put in a million dollars over your career and you expected to put in a million dollars over your career, then the project cost exactly what you said it would cost. Did you retire when you thought you would retire? Yep! Right on the planned retirement date. OK, so schedule performance is as expected and cost performance is as expected. The EVM numbers are all good and your retirement account is empty.

But, you are saying you would never have gone that long without checking on your investment to see how it is doing, right? You are also saying you would have pulled out long before retirement if it was doing nothing but losing money. Hmmm…OK, so that is exactly what your business leaders are doing when they ask you for status. They want to

know how their investment is being managed to get to the outcomes they want. Unfortunately, when they ask you for status, you answer them in EVM language – the money is being spent as expected, but what they really want to know is ROI projections – is the money I’m investing going to achieve the earnings we expect?

Let’s try another scenario…

Now what about the scenario of breaking even? What if you planned to put away one million dollars over the span of your career and your expected spend met your actual spend at retirement (a.k.a. your project completion date). According to EVM, you spent exactly what you expected to spend, you spent it in the time frame you expected to spend it, and the scope of your investments is exactly what you planned for. OK, EVM says we are rocking and rolling! Now, what happens if you spent years putting away a very well thought out and managed million dollars only to find out that you earned 0% on that money over the life of the investment? The money spent equals the money you earned. The money would have been better off in a basic checking account or money market earning 1% interest (the less risky project). Would that scenario be OK with you or would you be really upset with your retirement plan manager who promised great returns?

The “promise” of earnings was clear from the beginning and why you decided to invest your money in this way. Yet, here you are no better off than had you put the money under your mattress. The investment cost you exactly what you expected, and according to our EVM calculations, we are exactly on plan, yet the return on your investment was zero.

How about another scenario…

Now, what if you invest that retirement money and you see huge rewards? The earnings are phenomenal and you know you invested in the right places. That initial investment has grown well because you invested in the right funds, with the right manager watching over your investment, and you reaped huge benefits. You achieved a great return on your investment. Happy now, right?

Wouldn’t you want to do everything you could to ensure that all of your investments made repeated that same level of performance and focus? Would you want to ensure that your retirement plan manager was investing in the funds that were getting the

highest returns OR would you want him or her to just spread the love across all possible investment options and hope that there would be some return on some of them? Every investment fund should get a “fair chance” at your money, right? HAHA, no way, buddy! Not a chance. Put my money where the returns are the greatest – where we will have the greatest impact. Right? I’m pretty sure you would want them to focus their energy only on the ones that could give you the biggest bang for the buck. It’s the job of the investor to make sure that their money is being well spent on the investments that will yield the greatest return on the investment.

Enter your business leaders. That’s all they are trying to get you to help them do. Each project is an investment. An investment that we expect a return on. If that return is not there, then your company is better off putting the money under their mattress instead of doing all of that work.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.

I welcome your feedback and insights. Please leave a comment below.

See you online!

Warmly,

Have you ever gotten frustrated because your sponsor didn’t do what you were expecting them to do? I have. I used to get really frustrated that they seemed to not care as much about their own project as I did. It was super annoying.

Many years ago, I went to work for a company that wanted me to “turn their project managers into program managers and make them a PMO.” Hmmm…OK, that sounded like fun!

I went there all super charged to teach their project managers how to raise their game and take on a more strategic perspective of the organization. I wanted to help them see the big picture and put themselves in the shoes of the business leaders while helping the executed business strategy. It turns out, that was the easy part, or so it seemed…but things still weren’t improving as fast as I felt they should. Something was still not right. I knew instinctually that the results should have been even better than the incremental improvements we were seeing…what was up?

I shifted my focus to the sponsors. I saw how long things were dragging out because sponsors were almost completely unreachable. They never had time on their schedules for the program managers, yet were saying that all decision had to go through them. I’m sure it’s obvious to you why this would be an issue. Why wasn’t it to them? The only time you could get them, if you were lucky, was in sponsor meetings. The senior level business guy addressed the attendance issue in short order, but that was only the first issue. What was happening IN the sponsor meetings was even worse.

I sat in sponsor update meeting after sponsor update meeting, watching as the cowering and nervous program managers I had coached and developed sat fearfully in meetings waiting for the “beating” they were likely to take from the sponsor. The conversations would go something like this (consistently):

PM: Here’s where we are on the program. We have a variance from baseline on X triple constraint item. Here are the issues.

Sponsor: This is unacceptable. What are YOU going to do about that?

And a back and forth ensued, ultimately leaving the PM in the position of defending themselves and having to figure out how they were going to solve all of the problems by themselves. They were afraid to ask for help and didn’t know it was OK to do so.

Then it hit me. After watching this for long enough to make sure it was a consistent issue and not an isolated sponsor problem (I had learned from prior experience, not to go in guns blazing with process and such – watch and listen to uncover the real problems you can help solve), I knew we had some work to do.

I kept thinking, “Why are they doing this? Don’t they understand that we are here to run their programs with them? If we fail, they fail.”

After a few conversations with the sponsors that were brave enough to tell it like it is (and yes, this did take time and patience to peel back the layers and build trust before they spilled the beans), I understood what was happening. They didn’t understand their role. They had never had a PMO before and project management was something IT did. The PMO was a business function there to execute business strategy for this division (and ultimately later the entire organization) but it was new to them and the concept was championed by a business leader that was also fairly new to the organization.

Program Management was a much more business focused experience than what they had typically seen by project managers in the past. They just didn’t know there was another way. And they certainly didn’t know their role in supporting these more strategic programs lead to successful outcomes. It was just a different way to do things than what they had done in the past.

In order to help them, I had to understand where they were coming from. Now, I got it. It was naivety, not lack of interest or desire to support these programs. No one really explained to them what a sponsor was or what they did.

This is why it’s so important to never assume they “get it” when you are bringing change to an organization. You make assumptions and you can get way too far down a path without bringing your stakeholders along with you.

So, we had to teach them.

The first order of business was to get agreement from the PMO sponsor (the person that insisted upon us being there in the first place) that his business leaders had more than a stake in the outcome of these programs, they OWNED these programs. They were going to be measured by the success of failure of these initiatives and they were accountable for making sure the program managers had what they needed to do their jobs, which was to execute these programs with the sponsors.

Then, we had to agree to some basic tenants of sponsorship. We had to explain the role and help them understand how they were to interact with the programs.

We also had to be crystal clear on our side. We had to explain to them the role of the PMO and the program managers running their programs. It’s important that you do this both ways. They need to know how you will communicate with them, what you will share, what you will need from them, when you will need it, and how you will engage with them throughout the lifecycle. This will be your foundation that trust is built on. Lay that foundation thoughtfully.

Then, we had to bring it all together in a DRAFT form (the reason for this is important) to discuss and collaborate on so that we could ultimately reach agreement around accountability and everyone’s role in the process.

Why is the draft so important? This gets to all of the change management stuff I talk about. If you want people to come along with you in a change you are trying to create, you must do it with them, not to them.

In order to figure out what the right level of expectations and services should be for the PMO and PMs, you should definitely go back to doing your homework and understanding what the organization needs from you. This will help you figure out how you support the execution of business strategy for the organization. It depends on the culture of the organization, the trust you’ve built with your stakeholders, the strengths and weaknesses of your organization, and the needs of the business you are there to solve. This will inform you role as a PMO and for each PM.

For the sponsor, we developed a basic set of expectations we felt they could live up to. While this list is not exhaustive, it’s a pretty good start. The key is not to come with all of the answers, but with an outline of some of the answers and then let them think about how they can help and add to the list. If you want them to own it, you definitely want them to contribute to the process of creating it.

Here’s what we told them in this scenario:

Be an actively involved sponsor

1. Hold yourself and others accountable for their role in the program

2. Lead by example: respect and support the role of program manager

3. Hold your employees responsible for their engagement

4. Attend appropriate meetings to set expectations, remove barriers, and enable the program process

5. Clearly define program objectives and assist in setting realistic milestones

6. Be accessible to the team: Make it easy to get on your calendar!

7. Ensure that other managers required to support the effort are also accessible

8. Engage in the appropriate level of decision making and delegate responsibility for decision making authority to the right level

9. Actively work to remove barriers for the program team: ask “How can I help?”, every chance you get

Support the change with your peers and other senior leaders

1. Create awareness of the need for the change

2. Build support for the change at all levels

3. Clearly communicate expectations to team and all stakeholders

4. Manage change resistance from stakeholders

5. Ensure stakeholders/peers are building support within their own teams

6. Provide frequent updates to leadership

7. Act as a voice and champion for the change

8. Negotiate for resources and other support on the program team’s behalf

Communications

1. Communicate the need for the change

2. Create a sense of urgency and communicate risk of inaction

3. Connect business strategy and outcomes to the program/change

4. Use metrics to reinforce value and impact

5. Actively pursue stakeholder feedback throughout the change process

6. Be available to answer questions about the change and promote two-way communications

7. Provide your voice of support in key presentations and meetings

8. Support managers in communicating consistent message to employees

Remember to make this list your own. You can start small and work WITH your sponsor to figure out what will work best for you…but if you get stuck, this list is a great place to start.

Finally…before you get frustrated with your sponsor for not caring enough or being there when you need them, consider that they may not know that this is their role. This could be their first time in the role of sponsor…or maybe no one ever taught them how to engage. Or even worse, they have learned bad habits over the years that you will now have to help them break. Now you have to teach them. Be the leader. Be a teacher. Help them, help you, help them.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.

I welcome your feedback and insights. Please leave a comment below.

See you online!

Warmly,