What level of director/project-office micro-management is acceptable?
Anonymous
During the year I have been working in my current position, I have noticed the project-office and director involvement in project management increase significantly, to the point where it feels excessive. Having said that, I wanted to sense-check this with others to check that I am not over-reacting.
Remembering that all PM's are line managed by Programme Managers....
1) Financial and Earned Value spreadsheets submitted to the project office each month (am fine with this)
2) Monthly project review meetings, with three directors (including the COO) quizzing the PM about status. In recent months, this meeting always spawns actions which are often not related to critical path issues, such as being asked to draw up future commercialisation plans or perform economic analysis from a clients perspective. Follow up meetings to present these reports are often scheduled.
3) Monthly spreadsheets detailing partner/supplier time, which are then used in regular reviews with senior staff in the project office. Any deviation in the expected level of time spent is fed back to director level where follow-up reviews may take place.
4) Monthly 'actions list' for projects, lodged with the project office and following an initial set-up meeting with a senior staffer in the project office, are followed up by regular scheduled calls with the PM to check that actions have been carried out. Any deviation of this feeds back to the Ops director who will set up a meeting with the PM to discuss.
5) Six-monthly project 'audit' with a senior project office staffer to ensure all project paperwork is in order. Any deviation is fed back to director level.
6) Weekly project spend reporting to divisional director, requiring the Programme Manager to discuss weekly with PMs. Unexpected deviations (quite likely on a week to week basis) is interrogated further, often with a follow up meeting with the PM/Programme Manager.
7) Seemingly random new spreadsheets sent from the board, relating to differing metrics related to projects - usually sent through to PMs with a tight deadline to submit back. An example may be - spend to get to end of project, minus expenses and materials but including non-billed time, represented as flat-spend per month but tweaked to relate to whether it is a four or five week month etc.
In my previous organisation - which wasn't perfect - the PMs were largely left to manage their projects as they saw fit, with only monthly reporting to the project office and any follow-up, regular status and issue resolution being handled by the Programme Manager.
I am considering carrying out a simple time-and-motion study across my PMs to quantify how many man-hours are being spent on internal process, but wanted to first check that my concerns were valid, at least on the surface! Saving Changes...
1. Has there been a difference in project success within the past year or so? by this I mean, are projects falling behind schedule, going over budget, scope creep, etc?
2. By your last sentance, I'm guessing you are a Programme Manager yourself - is that a valid assumption?
3.What are the size of your projects in terms of money and duration?
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Stuart DixonProject Office Manager| Xl CatlinCrowbrough, United Kingdom
As a programme office manager, I can see that some of this from the PM perspective could be seen as overhead. Depending on the size of the organisation there will always come requests from outside any programme to know what is going on. The larger the programme or organisation the more of these are required.
What I would expect of a project office is that they would reduce the data collection on this, asking for a regular (either monthly or weekly depending on the information) update on progress i.e. a word summary, financials, schedule, risks/issues/change. I would then expect the project office to take all of this information & use it to provide the reporting those people outside the programme who want to know what is going on.
I think in your circumstance, as I have understood what you have outlined, what is happening is the project office is passing all requests directly to you, rather than taking a more holisitic view & asking for regular details and then handling all requests for reports & information out of what they already receive. In the project office I used to run I asked for a regular weekly progress report, and from that I covered the 5-10 other reports that came across my desk each week all wanting part of the information I gathered. Of course if I didn't get the weekly progress report I then sent each report to the project manager, and they could deal with each request as it came in. Very quickly I got the weekly reports.
I think what is missing from your project office is an understanding of what reports they may be asked for, and then managing the demand on you as programme/project manager.
Hope this helps. Saving Changes...
Mark Price PerryBusiness Driven PMO Evangelist| BOT InternationalOrlando, Fl, United States
Anon, very interesting post. I quite agree with Stuart's comments and Bethany's questions. I would only add two additional perspectives for your consideration.
First, some business environments require much more "micro-management" than others. Hence, any comparison that you are seeking to make needs to keep this in mind.
And second, micro-management is required increasingly when the organization and/or individuals within the organization are not performing at expected or acceptable levels.
So, keep this is mind. And, if you are seeking to benchmark others, make sure that your peer group is homogeneous with respect to both your business environment and your level of performance. A time and motion study could be of great value to management, especially if continuous improvement is part of your organization's culture. Saving Changes...
Your organization appears to be suffering from a bad case of Risk Aversion. I would suggest that in the recent past a significant project ended badly and the blame was placed on insufficient scrutiny/management/control of the project by the board - read stakeholders. While this level of participation may be less than ideal, the requests they are making - in my view - appear to be reasonable metrics that I would expect you would want to provide as part of a general status presentation to senior management.
I note that there are a couple of references to deviation from plan - either partner/supplier or schedule/cost. These are not unusual to me. I would expect that PM's would have an understanding of the impacts of changes and delays, and that they would be actively producing analysis of the causes of those impacts and actions that resolve those impacts. This might entail a re-baseline of the plan to adding staff, to reducing scope, to other measures.
Lastly - I would recommend you bring your concerns to a meeting of your highest level stakeholders. Present them with a breakdown of the most informative metrics you can identify and gain their concurrence and support for providing those metrics on a specific timetable. Explain that additional requests for data may impact delivery and extend project schedules - find data to support that ascertation, showing how previous request have added delay or interfered with milestone or schedule achievement.
Saving Changes...
