Building Blocks of Project Management - PMO Strategies · The Building Blocks of an Effective and...
Transcript of Building Blocks of Project Management - PMO Strategies · The Building Blocks of an Effective and...
Building Blocks of Project Management
© 2016 PMO Strategies
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Table of Contents Chapter Introduction: The Building Blocks of an Effective and
Sustainable PMO
01. PMO Building Block 1: The Type of PMO for Your
Organization
02. PMO Building Block 2: The Low Down on Methodologies
03. PMO Building Block 3: Which Tools Make a Difference?
04. PMO Building Block 4: The PMO Talent Profile
05. PMO Building Block 5: Successful Change Leadership
06. PMO Building Block 6: Alignment with What Matters
© 2016 PMO Strategies
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Introduction:
The Building Blocks of an Effective and
Sustainable PMO
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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
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fun will begin, 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
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Chapter 1:
PMO Building Block 1: The Type of PMO for
Your Organization
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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
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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
members that will resent what the PMO represents – more structure and
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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 these members into their categories, spend some
time working with them to learn where their pain points are; 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 provide that, you can’t be successful. Your promoters will lose interest
and your detractors will make your life miserable, all while the indifferent
members go along acting like you don’t exist.
Warning: Those who are indifferent are just as
dangerous as those who are detracting from your
success!
If you’re lucky, the people who 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. Then ask them what they
would do to solve those challenges. If you are building or transforming the PMO,
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even better! Those members will 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, each with their own
benefits and weaknesses. Familiarize yourself with the various structures out
there and figure out WHAT you are trying to solve. PMI – http://www.pmi.org and
CEB and http://www.executiveboard.com are great sources for that information.
This should be done before you 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
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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.
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Chapter 2:
Building Block 2: The Low Down on
Methodologies
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Implementation Methodology vs. Project Management / What’s New in Portfolio
Level Methodology?
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 “What’s” that need to be
considered as a project manager. Those “What’s” 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, with
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 “What’s” of
portfolio, program, and project management via the PMBOKs.
As far as the “How’s” 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, Systems Development Life
Cycle (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
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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 factor 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 this question, 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.
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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 top strengths for project managers. Now, take that a step
further. Leverage those components in such a way that your entire portfolio is
optimized and will hit the sweet spot for PMO leaders. You have fully leveraged
the “What’s” and “How’s” 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 7th 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)
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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. This offers 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.
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Chapter 3:
PMO Building Block 3: Which Tools Make a
Difference?
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Do Some Tools Have a Proven Success Over Others?
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
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them to invest another hefty sum of money in upgrading or replacing the tool.
Does 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 the least amount of valuable information.
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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. 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.
However, the tool doesn’t come into the picture just yet. 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, They will also be able to make some best practice recommendations to
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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 who didn’t follow the suggestions in this article will have the worst
experiences to share with you.
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There is one very important consideration with all of this. 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!
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Chapter 4:
PMO Building Block 4: The PMO Talent
Profile
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Why Getting the Right Talent Matters
For the last 14 years, I feel like I have been in constant hiring mode.
Actually, I HAVE been in constant hiring mode. Building, transforming, rescuing,
and running PMOs requires a constant focus on talent management. I constantly
had resumes on my desk and have looked at thousands of resumes and
conducted countless interviews. What I have found in that process is that there
are definitely things to look for in the resume and in those early phone
conversations. But, you have to be able to spend time with this person face to
face to see if they are going to have what it takes to drive real change for you.
So, what characteristics do these super stars have?
First…they usually do have at least one certification. Whether it’s the PMP
or another continuing education certification or degree, I’ve noticed that the
people who are really into the profession, and the kind of people that like to
continue to grow and further their careers, all have some type of designation or
credential. Not only does this show that they have a leaning toward their own
career development and improvement, but it allows your team to have a common
language when they communicate. That saves a lot of time in translating when
you are asking them to share information or help each other with a project. With
that said, that only gets your resume in front of me. It doesn’t determine whether
or not I will hire you. In my book, that’s simply table stakes.
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Certifications matter, but only so much…
So, what does this talent look like? Sure, they have PMPs, and they have
experience managing projects and programs. In order to be competitive and the
kind of person I want to hire, it is necessary that they have sharp communications
skills and the ability to influence anyone to do anything. As silly as it sounds, they
also have to be…well… likable. I’ve seen some of the sharpest minds lose an entire
audience by not being able to reach them on a personal level. Where the rubber
really meets the road is on the soft skills side.
It starts with communications
and expectations management. One of
my super stars was helping me
interview and the candidate asked him
what I was like to work for. He said,
“That’s easy. Just do what you say you
are going to do. Manage her expectations! She’s savvy and will know if you aren’t
being straight with her. Be realistic. Ask for help when you need it, but set the bar
where you think you can reach it. Setting the bar too low is just as bad as setting it
too high.” This is what the right talent knows. Expectations management is, above
all, the best way to manage up. They know they have to keep me engaged and
informed so that I can come to the ready immediately when they need me. My
job is to provide them air cover. The rest of the time, my job is to support them,
be available to brainstorm ideas, and then get out of their way! Good talent needs
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the creative freedom to solve problems and manage the efforts the way they see
fit.
The types of resources you want in your PMO are change agents by
lifestyle, not just job title. These people are the ones that can and do handle
change well, on an ongoing basis. Not just project change, but these people are
continually growing and evolving in their personal lives and know how to “live”
change. They are the ones that have some kind of regular development and
interests outside of work that give them that well rounded, and looking to keep
changing/growing, kind of approach to life. Who better to sit with your customers
and help them live through a change than those that do so continually?
A pattern that has emerged for me in the super star talent is related to the
ability to show empathy. This talent
needs to be able to meet the customer,
client, project team member. It also
means knowing where they are, not
where they’d like them to be. The right
talent inherently knows this and
constantly puts themselves in the shoes
of their stakeholders, addressing their needs before those stakeholders even
realize they have the need. The ability to get into someone’s head and
understand what their motivators are and how you can leverage individual
motivations toward common project goals is truly an art.
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This talent becomes a chameleon of sorts, by remaining flexible to the
different demands of stakeholders. They know who they need to be for each
audience. The executive wants to know the bottom line; the project team wants
to know that they have someone watching their back; the customer wants to
know that they are going to get what was promised. All of this goes into how this
kind of talent will interact with their stakeholders and who to be to whom, and
when. The PMO leader wants to know that the stakeholders are all getting what
they need and that the projects are being delivered. The good ones are going to
have an inherent sense about what needs to get done and how to get it done in a
way that keeps everyone happy and productive.
You have to find them, and then you have to keep
them…happy.
Leverage the super star talent you already have to help
you interview these candidates. Good talent knows good talent when they see it.
And speaking of good talent, make sure you are hiring for diverse strengths. You
need a diverse set of skills in order to apply different types of people to different
situations. Since they will be very diverse in their strengths, they will also likely
need to be managed differently. Know how to give them what they need to be
successful by having a flexible management style. The kinds of resources you
want are going to need to be constantly challenged and engaged.
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I’ve been fortunate enough to find this talent in my career and, when I do, I
find ways to work with them again and again. Who wouldn’t want to have these
people on their team? They meet with their stakeholders, rally them around a
goal, keep everyone moving and feeling good about it because their own personal
needs are being addressed, and get things done…on time and as expected.
With the kind of talent described above, you can safely let go of the reigns
and trust them to get the job done. Isn’t that what we are all looking for?
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Chapter 5:
PMO Building Block 5: Successful Change
Leadership
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Creating Change Advocacy in Your Organization
Change management is essentially about three things: The project, the
people and the people. What does that mean? The project is about the work that
needs to be accomplished. Essentially, we are talking about the scope. Getting
this work done, by the way, is also about the people. In order for any project to be
successful, you need that talent we discussed earlier, driving the changes within
the organization, and they must bring along those stakeholders that are a part of
the change.
Secondly, successful change management is about the people side of
change. That means that we must have a good change management strategy in
place that looks at what needs to
change (the project) and how that
change is going to be implemented
(through the people). There are many
methodologies out there that help you
figure out how to create a great
change strategy. One of my
favorites is Prosci’s change
management methodology.
Above all, though, it’s about the people. What do I mean here? I am talking
about the sponsorship of your change. The number one reason that change
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initiatives fail or succeed can be clearly tied back to how active and engaged the
sponsors are on the change initiative. Sound right? Think back to any change
projects you were a part of or are a part of right now. Are your sponsors
engaged? Are they asking the right questions about how they can help, and
removing barriers for you to be successful? If not, you are going to feel like you
are pushing a boulder up a hill with others simultaneously pushing it back down
the hill. Why is that? Because they are!
Change is tough. Not everyone is going to be onboard with the changes you
are creating in the organization via your PMO. So, what do you
do?
First, you start with change agents.
Following the principles outlined in hiring the
right change agents in your PMO, you should be on
your way to solving for the PMO as change agents.
They are the champions for change and the ones driving
the changes within the organization. Once you’ve got
them on board, you then focus on those that are likely to
work with you to drive change within the organization. They
are the stakeholders on the project that are eager to roll up their sleeves and
help. They are activists for the change and they are vocal about wanting to see
progress. LEVERAGE THEM.
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These groups of change agents in your PMO, and across the organization,
can be organized and leveraged in a way that lets them
provide a “leadership from the bottom up” approach.
Work with their passion and give them the information
they need to act as vocal supporters of the changes
you are creating within your organization. You should
also empower them to hold others in your organization
accountable for the change they need to participate in.
Leading by example and asking the right questions is a
quick way to get the positive reinforcement your
change initiative will need.
Secondly, you must engage your sponsors.
This is a big one. I remember being relatively new to an organization and
watching what happens when sponsors don’t know how to engage. I was hired to
build a PMO, but before I was there, they had hired several program managers
and said, “OK, now you are a PMO”. They brought me in to help teach these
program managers how to “be program managers,” and to build a PMO to
manage some transformational change the company was about to undertake. I
quickly observed that, yes, the PMs did need some education, but you know who
was really in need of some training? The sponsors.
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No one had taken the time to explain to them their role in the changes they
were responsible for implementing. They would stare at the PM in a sponsor
update and just wait for the PM to report on, and then provide, solutions for the
problems they were facing. So, one of my first and most important acts was to
pull all of these sponsors together and teach them
what it meant to be a sponsor. They need to feel
responsible for the changes because, oh by the way,
they are responsible for the changes! They are the
business unit leaders that are supposed to be
creating change in their organizations. They are
leveraging the PMO as a facilitator of that change,
but they are ultimately accountable. Help them learn this and tie this
accountability to their professional success, and you will be on your way. Look for
a separate article specifically on the roles and responsibilities of a sponsor in
coming months!
Once you have educated your sponsors, you have to keep them actively
engaged. You do this by giving them access to all of the information they need on
a regular basis to make educated and informed decisions, remove barriers, and
champion the change. When you give them this information, you then tell them
what they need to act on and the impact of any decisions they make. This will
help them accomplish a shared objective. You will make them look good while
they are getting done what you need to get done for the changes to be successful.
As they are driving results, they are now seen as someone that can make real
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change happen in the organization and, oh by the way, they are becoming a huge
advocate of the PMO in the process…everyone likes someone that makes them
look good.
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Chapter 6:
PMO Building Block 6: Alignment with What
Matters
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Driving Real Change across an Enterprise
I’m going to wrap up this series by going back to the beginning. Alignment
with what matters means that you master both the art and the science of
establishing a PMO. First, you have the right people, doing the right things, the
right way. Then, once you have those fundamental building blocks in place, you
must focus your energy on creating change and aligning your PMO with the needs
of your business.
In the first post of this series, we learned how to ask the right questions to
understand how to be the “go to” resource for your leadership to manage
change. Once you figure out how to become relevant to your business leaders,
you must figure out how to stay relevant, if you want to be an invaluable solution
to your organization. Keep talking, engaging, and asking questions. Continue to
look for the places where changes need to be made. Continue to look at where
the C-suite is spending their energy. Continue to improve your PMO capabilities
to stay in touch with the needs of your stakeholders.
According to the Economist Survey: Why good strategies fail – Lessons from
the C-suite, 61% of executives admit that their firms often struggle to bridge the
gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation. The C-suite
sets organizational direction, which is realized through strategy implementation.
The challenge is that many of those brilliant visionaries don’t know how to get the
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changes implemented. That’s where the PMO comes in. They need you even if
they don’t know it! You must be the strategy navigator for your organization.
How does your PMO become the strategy
navigator? It starts with earning your seat at the
table during strategy definition. Don’t just assume
that they will know to invite you in or that you have
the right to be there. Bring a needed skill or value to
the table. The PMO can be the facilitator of the
strategy definition process. Offer to schedule the
meetings, take the notes, and facilitate the process of getting the appropriate
subject matter experts together to define the business strategy. Do whatever it
takes to get you in the room. Once you are in the room, you are a part of the
conversation. Once you are a part of the conversation, you now have a firsthand
look at the challenges the company is facing and what they are doing to solve
them. You will hear what really matters and the thinking behind getting to where
they want to go. You are now in the know.
Once the strategies are defined, the PMO is the natural place for those
changes to be managed. You have the experts, the tools, and the methodology
that is necessary to deliver on the strategies. By earning your seat at the table
during the strategy definition process, you are now also their trusted advisor and
partner on executing the strategy implementation plan.
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Finally, with the right portfolio management solution at your fingertips, you
are now the place that the executives will go to find out how their initiatives are
doing. This makes you an invaluable resource to the leadership of the
organization. When they need to know how things are going, they are coming to
your PMO. That’s exactly where you want to be.
Now let’s focus, once again, on people. Where you have your people
aligned says a great deal about what you, as a PMO leader, value. Make sure you
are aligning your talent against the portfolio of initiatives according to
their strengths, where relationships already exist, and where they
have subject matter expertise. You must use the right person for
the job. Just like every tool in the toolbox solves a different
problem, each change initiative will need a change leader
with different strengths. Don’t forget the post on PMO
Talent in this series. It is crucial to hire correctly so that you
have a team of change leaders that can fit the various types
of business changes you will need to manage.
The PMO is, and should be, a constantly evolving organization. You will
learn new things every day about the organization, the people, the culture, and
what it takes to be successful in meeting the stakeholder needs. Be aware, ask
questions, and make sure your PMO remains agile so that you can respond as the
needs shift. These techniques and an appetite for success are the key building
blocks you need to build an effective and sustainable PMO.
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Thanks for taking the time to read this eBook. If you would like to sign up to
receive our blog posts, newsletters, or any other information, please visit our
website at pmostrategies.com
I welcome your feedback and insights, as well as suggestions for new topics or
challenges you are facing when creating change. Feel free to write us at
[email protected] and we will be in touch!
Warmly,
Laura Barnard, PMP
Founder & CEO, PMO Strategies