PMO Overboard

One of the major goals of every PMO is to help build consistency across an organization. Many of us, and many executives, have interpreted consistency as using the same processes or forms. As I said in my Cargo Cult discussion, there are some of the dangers of jumping right into implementing forms, procedures, guidelines and standards before building the proper infrastructure. Even with good planning and the right support system in place, you can get trapped into a situation that morphs your PMO from a corporate leader and change agent to the equivalent of the Auditing department for projects.

OK, now that I’ve offended auditors everywhere, let me state clearly that I feel that auditing and standards are a vital part of bringing consistency and compliance to any organization. Without verification, how will you know how well you are doing? What I am cautioning against is the danger of making verification and auditing the primary functions of the PMO. Certainly you will have some of this work, but if you do not carefully exercise growth, you may end up spending more time telling people how to fill out forms than anything else.

So, if we assume that you have grander expectations for your PMO, how do you avoid this trap? There are several methods and techniques that you can use. The first is to follow Ulysses’ lead and prepare for the song of the Sirens.

Listen to Siren’s Song (and live through it)
There are many sirens out there, and they are not all trying to sell you the ultimate enterprise software or methodology or training or consulting. Some are far more subtle, so tie yourself to the mast, and listen to the song, Mythology tells us of several sirens and their powers. Without pushing too far, let’s use them as a metaphor for what you will face.

I say “tie yourself to the mast” because restraint is vital to any engagement with sirens. I did not say that you should put wax in your ears. The siren’s can offer great benefits and solve a lot of your problems. The danger is not in hearing the song, but rather in crashing your ship on the rocks. You will be lured by comprehensive, detailed and well thought out solutions. Sirens will promise you a comprehensive pre-built solution to your problems that, with a few tweaks, will be perfect. When you first hear those sweet sounds, prepare for some dangerous waters.

What you want to do is emulate Ulysses and gain the benefits without crashing. I can’t tell you what you may need to do in every situation, but here are some examples

Software: Software solutions today provide for almost every need of a PMO, which is exactly what you have to watch out for. In today’s environment, software is often the only solution. By making a careful evaluation of what you need and what the software offers, you can implement only a select subset of functions, and then only in a controlled manner. Don’t open the flood gates.

Consulting: This is another wonderful resource. Consultants have faced similar situations and are often specialists at what they do. As with software, they will often offer more than you need by singing their sweet and reasonable song. Here you must have your goals set, defined and finite. If you know exactly what you want the consultants for, then you can control the situation. Even if you want them to give you recommendations, make that a separate engagement with the delivery of recommendations. Once you have those, you can decide which you want to take and then engage consultants where you need them.

Certification: This is one that blindsides a lot of us. There are some standard setting bodies the offer certification through compliance with their standards. In my experience, most of these bodies produce outstanding products and organizations that adopt these standards have consistently shown marked improvement. Like Ulysses, listen to this song and benefit, but beware of the rocks.

The Rocks
Simply put the danger with all of these is that you will implement something that requires a substantial support system. Guess where the resources to do this will come from? Right – your PMO! The bigger and more complicated a system, process or standard you put in place, the more work you will have to do to keep it alive. You may have to budget and resources to handle this, more likely you don’t.

You are probably constrained by headcount and / or money. Based on your goals, how do you want to spend your limited resources? Many a PMO has died by trying to implement something that took more resources than they had, or that fundamentally changed the PMO. Many directors have told me that they can’t call their team “The PMO” because PMO has a bad name. They then go on to say how the old PMO tried to implement this enterprise-wide software system, or process or certification and failed. They failed because they were seduced by the lure of the “comprehensive solution.”

What probably happened was that the PMO started with a mandate to create change and an abundance of enthusiasm. They then tried to implement something that was so complex / difficult/ intricate that, in the blink of an eye, the PMO transformed from change leader to the enforcer of the status quo. Naturally, this gained them nothing but enmity, resulting in the demise of the PMO. You probably want to avoid this.

Navigation:
Start with the obvious. Keep it simple. You do this by sticking with your goals and putting everything else to the side. There will be many attractive side paths that lead only to destruction. You are better served to achieve one goal on time than to accomplish too much too late. You can always do more, but you know all this.

Next you will want to determine how the work can be rolled out and shared. Not the implementation, but the ongoing operations. If you implement something that only the PMO can manage, then only the PMO will manage it. Think about rolling out procedures, tools and forms in such a way that they can (as much as possible) be supported by the organization as a whole. You want Project Management to become part of the culture, what better way to do that than to have everyone contributing. One way to think of it is like performance evaluations. In most companies, these are not done by HR, but rather by management and often with employee contributions. Performance evaluation is part of the culture.

Using a software system as an example, if you start with time management only, implement that and give maintenance and reporting capabilities to the users, you will have made a major achievement. By keeping your destination in mind and sharing the control with others, you can still hear the siren’s song without crashing on the rocks.

Marketing Your PMO – Metrics - Control

Control:

The control drivers are similar to, and overlap, many of the other metric areas, but I think it is important to note that in some instances control is the success criteria. Project Management is an excellent medium for improving control in an organization. Every one has experienced the feelings of helplessness and frustration when things get out of control. If you have children, you know exactly what I am talking about. Unfortunately, even Project Management will not help that problem, but it will help at work. Image the frustration that a COO or CIO feels when they do not seem to be able to influence or change the way their organization works. To them things seem out of control, so they look for ways of creating a situation where they have a certain level of control over what is happening.

You will know that control issues exist when there are not really any good answers to some of the following questions:

• What is everyone working on?
• How much time are we spending on new projects?
• Are we spending our time on the most important work?
• How are we progressing the corporate goals?
• Why is everyone so busy yet nothing seems to be getting done?
• Why does everyone hate us (this happens a lot when IT gets out of control)

And so on. The asking of these questions is the first step in addressing any control issues. If no one recognizes the symptoms as being the result of control issues, then you have an entirely different problem. Control is one of the best ways to advance Project Management in your organization. This problem is a great opportunity to show value, and once you have hooked management on being in control, they will never let go. Hey – they wanted management so they could be in control right? So what to do?

Control metrics are going to be a little broader in scope than the other metrics. One level of control is simply knowing what is going on and being able to direct that. This requires relatively simple metrics and measures. However, you can move up the scale to such things as portfolio management and balanced scorecards which are far more complex and involved. I’m not going to do justice to the more complex metrics, but let’s cover the highlights of possible alternatives.

Inventory – Hopefully you have done this, or at least started. Knowing what is going on is the first step of control. Find out what everyone in the organization is working on. Not what they say they are working on, but what is actually going on. At first this will take some interviewing and investigation. I’ve found that this can be a communication issue. For example, you might ask an IT manager what her group works on. She might recite 4 or 5 big projects and a few smaller ones and completely neglect to tell you about maintenance time. You are representing project management, so the people you talk to may think you are asking only about project management. In the case above, it may have sounded like the manager’s team was not doing a lot, until you find out that 80% of her team’s time is spent on production problem resolution and enhancements. There may be a perception by others that her team doesn’t get much done because no one knows about this other time. Once you find out what is being worked on – document and publicize. That alone will change things.

I’m willing to bet that you will find that your organization is split into an unhealthy number of separate activities. In one personal example, I did this study and found that an IT organization of 150 people were working on 78 separate projects as well as performing regular IT support functions. One CIO referred to this type of situation as a “death of a thousand cuts.” I’ve seen this again and again; look for it in your organization. Just bringing this to light will create some real benefits.

Aggregated PM Metrics – Another more advanced way of demonstrating control is to take the information generally gathered at the project level and aggregate and summarize them. This is the traditional metrics you would expect from a PMO. Some examples are:

• Projects Delivered on time / on budget / variance
• Project Change counts and magnitude
• Actual v. Estimated
• Resource Time (Realization and Utilization are good here)

Advanced Metrics – Like I said, I will not cover these in detail here, but below are some examples:

• NPV of Project Portfolio
• IRR of Project Portfolio
• Balanced Scorecard and Portfolio Metrics such as:
  o Customer Satisfaction
  o Financial Achievement
  o Alignment / Advancement of organization goals
  o Improved Revenue
  o Cost Savings
  

There are others, but I caution against these until you have the ability and demand for this type of information. These types of metrics require a bit of infrastructure and effort. If management is not willing and ready to commit this (which they are usually not at the beginning), then you will be in a very unpleasant situation where you cannot deliver. If you get pressure to go with the full load, do whatever you can to push towards a small start. Suggest a prototype, starting with easier information, whatever. I’ve said before one of the best ways to fail with a PMO is to over promise.

Marketing Your PMO – Metrics - Competency

Continuing with the basic metrics that you can use to show PMO value.

Competency:
The drive for Project Management competency generally comes from some internal source or sources. This may actually be a primary driver of the existence of your PMO. These drivers generally take the form of statements like “we need to become more capable with our project execution” or “we plan to become a world class organization.” Terms like “best practices” also are thrown around here. The idea is that there is a clear recognition that something is missing – project management competence. Unfortunately, this lack creates some problems for you in trying to fill that void.

One problem is that “competency” is only very generally defined and understood and will mean different things to different people. Your job at this point is to nail down a definition. You start by interviewing stakeholders giving particular attention to those who hold the purse strings for the PMO. Yes, that sounds superficial, but in order to infuse a Project Management culture in your organization, you have to exist, to exist you need support and money. After interviewing you should have some qualifications that stick out as competency measures. This then is your basis for the measurements and communication of competency.

Now comes and important part of the work. You have information about competency and how to measure it. With this information you can create the definition of competence. If you do not clearly define competency and communicate that definition, you run the risk of not meeting expectations of those who have a slightly different perception. With a common definition, you can shoot for goals that are understood by all.

Another problem with competency is the same one that every new PMO faces. How can you show improvement? You want to be careful that you are not implying incompetence as the prior condition, but rather show improvement in existing capabilities. I recommend that once you have defined competency and communicated (socialized) this, you benchmark. For each component of competency, where do you stand right now? Benchmarking gives you a lot of advantages:

• It gives a much better picture of the current state
• It involves many stakeholders giving them even more input and buy-in
• It gives you time to better define, adjust and communicate what you will be doing.
• It gives stakeholders time to become comfortable with the ideas

Of course the biggest reason is to get the baseline metrics and to be able to show improvement from those initial values. Everyone has agreed to what competency is. They have agreed that more competency is better than less. They have agreed that the organization is at the defined baseline. If you can show that your PMO is moving the organization from less competency to more competency, you are clearly showing that the PMO has value.

So what are those metrics that will show value? While these may be easy to list here, measuring these may not be quite as simple. Let me start with the easier ones.

Training and/or certification of Project Managers: Clearly if your Project Managers are more competent, then the organization is more competent. If your company will spring for it, PMP certification is a great idea. From my personal perspective, I do not recommend this as something to be taken lightly. I’ll get on my soapbox for a second. The PMP certification is something that belongs to those of us who choose Project Management as our profession. I do not think that PMP are three letters to be put after someone’s name so that they can get a better job, or a higher salary. If you are not serious about PM, don’t bother. Anyway, that said, certification of dedicated, capable people is a clear indication of improved competence (also consistency). Other types of training work well also. You may have internal courses, you could have a vendor come in and give a class or series of classes or send team members offsite. Any of these works as long as you are consistent and measure. Creating a career path (I’ll cover that later) with required training and showing progress along that path is a great method.

A Knowledge Repository. This can be the beginning of your methodology, a library of best practices, or anything similar. The idea is to build something that can be accessible to everyone and that will contain institutional knowledge. Some good components of this might be:

• Lessons Learned
• Common Project Risks
• Useful Documents and Forms – project status reports, meeting minutes, etc- the beginning of methodologies
• Approval and Review Recommendations – who needs to know about your project and review/ approve steps
• Templates
• Past project folders

This area will be a great place to consolidate the knowledge and experience of the organization and show that you are learning from the past.

Industry Standard Measures: There are quite a few of these that measure competency for an organization, such as CMM for software, Six Sigma for quality and efficiency, or OPM3 for Project Management. A warning, these tend to be very comprehensive and detailed. I do not suggest adopting any of these without a lot of forethought, money, patience and commitment. Going down one of these roads is NOT trivial. I do recommend that you become familiar with these and others. There is a lot of great information, ideas, measures and knowledge in these methodologies. The methodologies use Key Indicators or Key Process Areas and other measures, almost any of which make a great metric for measuring competency and improvement in your PMO.

Cargo Cult Project Management

Maybe you have experienced this phenomenon. You are at a company and they have a PM methodology, they are using the forms, there may even be people with Project Manager titles, but the benefits and results that come from project management are not there. I suggest that organizations like this are suffering from “Cargo Cult Project Management.” I doubt I can trademark that, so feel free to use it as your own. Let me indulge in a little history for those who may not be familiar with the term.

During World War II the Allied forces occupied many of the Pacific islands. Up until that point, many of the inhabitants of these islands had never seen manufactured goods. With the military occupation, things like clothing, food, weapons and other manufactured goods were delivered in plentiful quantities. These supplies arrived in airplanes. To the islanders who were unfamiliar with manufacturing or powered flight, the arrival of the good from airplanes seemed to be a direct delivery from the gods. After the war, the airplanes and their cargo, no longer came. In an attempt to get the planes to return islanders made airplanes out of wood, radio sets out of bamboo, and even painted military symbols on their bodies. They talked on the radios, waved flags, and lit up the runways at night, all to no avail.

This is not unlike what happens at some companies today. We use project charters, create Project Manager job titles, and produce a methodology but nothing really happens. We don’t get all those great project management benefits. Some PMO Directors have told me that they are not allowed to call their organization “the PMO.” This is invariably due to an unsuccessful attempt at a PMO which left everyone bitter and disillusioned. I can certainly sympathize with those feelings. Imagine how the natives that spent all day waving palm leaf flags felt when they finally realized that no cargo was coming. Just like these natives, executives and management have been asked to do a lot of work for little or no result.

How did this happen? More importantly, what can be done? In my opinion, this happens for two primary reasons. First, too much emphasis is placed on the trappings and appearance of project management. Secondly, someone tried to implement project management in the wrong order. Let’s look at the second reason first.

You can read earlier articles where I talked about the need to build your PMO through People, Processes, and Tool and in that order. In the case of a cargo cult PMO, someone has started with the tools. Not necessarily a purchased software product, although that is common, but the forms, the meetings, the language and other end products of Project Management. Just like the natives, we started with all the right tools, and got no result. The reason the natives did not get cargo is because there was no infrastructure, no industry, trade or machinery to create the cargo. Similarly, a PM tool without the underlying support of the right people and the right processes will fail.

Next there is this (IMHO) unhealthy focus on the physical aspects of project management, the forms, tools, reports. These are not project management. If you’re reading this, you probably already know that, but some PMOs have gotten a bad name because they tried to start there. This is a huge temptation and absolutely understandable. Your management is demanding that you show results so by creating a methodology or by implementing a tool you can show that something has actually happened. Something did happen and it may look like project management, it may even feel like project management, but it’s no more project management than a coconut headset is a radio.

Now, I am not saying that you can’t succeed if you start off with tools and methodologies. Some companies (the very rare ones) may already have a fertile environment for this. I’ll bet that if you looked carefully at these companies you would find that they already had the right people and processes in place; they just probably were not calling it Project Management. Unfortunately, most places are not like that. So what do you do if you are stuck in this kind of situation?

I think the first step is to assess what is going on. Resist the impulse to act, you probably represent the last chance project management will have at your company for the foreseeable future. If you fail, then you and project management are out the door. After you have an understanding of what is going on, cut, cut and cut some more. Get rid of every one of the forms or tools or processes that is not creating significant and measurable value. You can figure out what these are by observation. If everyone enters 8 hours for a project every day, then your time system is not being used correctly – can it. At this point you are not trying to fix anything - that will come later. Just clean house.

What you will be left with are the people, processes and tools that are producing and valuable. Start here by enhancing and consolidating. Improve what is working. Bring everything into a consistent whole. Call this your methodology if you want, but please do not confine project management to a series of steps to be taken. If you confine PM then so will everyone else. Things get more complicated from here and I’ve already written on several of these topics, so I’ll stop here. The idea is to stop doing the things that do not work and start doing the things that will.

Metrics References

Apologies to my past professors for not using the correct reference style, but frankly I don't feel like spending an hour correctly formatting a set hyperlinks. And since this is not for a grade I don't have to.

These are some of the documents I read when putting together the articles and presentation on metrics. I used a little of this and a little of that, so all share pretty equally. My thanks to the authors for making their work available.

Assessing the Value of Project Management Offices (PMO) By PROFESSOR YOUNG H. KWAK, PH.D. (KWAK@GWU.EDU, HTTP://GWU.EDU/~KWAK ) AND CHRISTINE XIAO YI DAI, PH.D. CANDIDATE (CDAI@GWU.EDU )

Selling Project Management to Executives: What’s the hook? Dr. Janice Thomas, Associate Professor, Centre for Innovative Management, Athabasca University, JaniceT@athabascau.ca

Growing Your Business Through The Project Management Office Steve Rollins, MBA, PMP, Steve.Rollins@EPM-Solutions.com.

The State of the Project Management Profession Gregory G. Stine, PMP, Project Management Institute.

Marketing Your PMO – Metrics (cont.)

Cost:
The BIG one! This metric is probably something you are already tracking. I’m sure you have been asked “what is the PMO buying me?” or “Is the PMO worth it?” or other such frightening inquiries. There are a lot of drivers for cost. Certainly, the desire to get the most out of every dollar is the underlying driver, but this does have some different flavors such as:
Resource Efficiency – how much productivity am I getting out of my staff? This can take a lot of forms – time on projects, time on maintenance, burdened cost, overhead…

Faster Project Completion – of course, the sooner they get done, the sooner we can start raking in the benefits and the more projects we can do overall, a big benefit of the PMO!

Reduction of Redundancy – here is a portfolio savings that PMOs bring. If you can eliminate a $1millon project because it represents duplicate work, then your PMO just saved the company $1million – almost enough to pay your salary. OK, the PMO does not deserve all the credit for the savings, but there is certainly a real justification that without your PMO, the company might have gone down the wrong path – or the same path twice.

Costs of Defects - Many of you are familiar with the formulas that show how much it costs to fix a problem or make a change in design versus how much it costs when you get to production. Improved product quality is a real benefit of Project Management. If you can measure and reduce the cost of changes and defects, then you are saving the company money or reducing cost.

Effective Forecasting - While this may not be considered a cost metric, it is certainly financial, and it does impact costs when a company does not have an effective cost forecasting model. How many times have you had to stop buying office supplies in November or December just to make budget? Your PMO can help management effectively forecast costs over longer periods which will lessen headaches and ultimately saves money.

PMO ROI – can’t forget this one. Your PMO will be seen by many as a cost vortex. If you’re going, you may be perceived as a black hole where the company has all these high paid people who do nothing. You will be fighting this constantly. You should really plan to continuously combat this perception via good marketing. Don’t think for a minute that you can establish that the PMO is worth it and then relax. You can never relax (OK – maybe never is the wrong word, but if there is someone out there who is relaxed about this, please write).

Because of the last bullet (PMO ROI), you will want to mirror your cost information with any savings or profits that resulted from your work. Whenever possible, report costs and benefits together. If you’re doing a balanced scorecard, or consolidated PMO status report, that is a great way of showing the whole picture. So where do you get all this lovely information and how do you report it?

A good mental model for cost metrics is earned value. Think “what value did I create for the money spent.” You may even want some form of CPI for you PMO; you could chart your CPI over time showing the return on investment. If you can couple that with a visual on the cumulative savings, even better. Something that looks like this might be very effective.

Here the ever-rising Blue line shows the cumulative savings over time while the pink line shows the CPI for your PMO. I have to stop here and make a recommendation about reporting in general. I have been very influenced by the work of Edward Tufte, his analysis of design and presentation are (IMHO) unsurpassed. The most important thing I have learned is that the presentation of information can be as vital to the message as the information itself. Before you start putting together management reports, I highly recommend that you look at his work. He has several great books, and he also has seminars. I went to a one-day one and it was worth every moment. Back to cost.

If you have information about what things cost before your PMO, then you will want to use that as much as possible. You can use these prior numbers for a while (months to a year) until you have established a trend and collected good post-PMO information. Once you have enough data on that, you can start comparing how you did last period to how you are doing this period, showing progress always. This really holds true for any of the metrics we’re discussing.

If you always measure cost as a factor of benefits, then we can present both sides of the equation. If you were to present just costs, then a document showing PMO costs would exist separate from a document showing PMO benefits. This document can then be used to argue that the PMO is costing the company money. Without the other side of the equation, you risk perception problems. Some ways of presenting costs and benefits are:

• PMO costs v. Project Benefits. Take the benefits portion of every project run by the PMO and compare that to your costs. Granted this is not a real return on investment, since a lot more went into producing those benefits than just your project management.
  
• PMO costs v. Project Management Savings. If you can, compare the costs of pre-PMO projects to that of post-PMO projects. Since you are now more efficient, you will be able to show how you are saving money. You can also show improved throughput with the same resources or even less people doing more.
  
• Project Hours v. Maintenance Hours. What you want to document here is that we are now spending more time on projects and less time on maintenance. This is probably going to be hard to get in the beginning, but as your projects go in and create better products, your ratio will improve. There is a general perception that time spent on projects is better than time spent keeping the lights on, so demonstrating an improvement in this area will be good.
  
  I think I overstayed my welcome on this one, so I’ll stop here. I will start trying to present more visual information and links as I continue. I’ve been pretty lax in that area and want to share some of the great sources out there.
  
  
  

Marketing Your PMO – Metrics

So, how well is the PMO doing? How much money are you saving the company? Have you created a Project Management culture? Are your projects more successful? Are they taking less time, more efficient, lest costly, higher quality…. Are you going nuts trying to figure out how you can prove your PMO is helping? Well Metric is certainly one way to communicate this.

The metrics a PMO Director may be concerned with fall into three broad categories. Project Metrics – these tell how well an individual project is doing, so things like EVA, risks, issues, those types of information would be collected and reported. Second there are Portfolio Metrics. This is a completely different topic, but corporate alignment, strategic goals and so forth would be covered here. Lastly, and most germane to this column are PMO Metrics. I’ve divided these into 5 categories based on the primary drivers. This is no firm, hard-and-fast categorization, but rather something that just helps me think about the purpose and type of metrics. The categories and some discussion are below:

Compliance:
The compliance driver I usually external to the organizations and can come in the form of laws, regulations or contract agreements. Probably the most prevalent and well-known compliance driver these days is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The basic premise behind compliance is to ensure that a certain minimum level is reached. If you have children, you know exactly what compliance is when you say – “clean your room” and do an inspection later to find that everything has been stuffed in the closet. For which you usually get the response “you didn’t tell me to clean the closet.” So, while I don’t advocate this method of compliance, the basic tenet is the same. Compliance Metrics then need to measure and communicate compliance.

First, you need to understand the compliance and non-compliance conditions. In many cases this is written somewhere, probably a contract or some other legal document, so get ready for some confusing reading. If you are lucky, said document may have information about how compliance/non-compliance will be determined. If it does, then those measures are exactly what you will use. In any case some determined investigation on your part will reveal the compliance goals.

From there, create a process to measure those goals and begin measuring. Create a contingency plan to bring you back into compliance should the metrics show you have slipped. The use of run-chart type measurements with control limits is well suited for compliance measurement. But remember, you are not looking to be “exceptional” or “superior” at compliance, this is a pass/fail game, so do not put more into this than is necessary to ensure that you are passing. Kind of like the PMP test right?

Consistency:

The drivers for consistency usually come from inside an organization. Often they come as directives or mandates from management. These can be as simple as “we need to be more consistent around here” to adoption of one of the more rigorous methodologies. Some of the better known methodologies are Capability Maturity Model in software development, Six Sigma, ISO, or OPM3. All of these methodologies have a foundation of consistency. It’s a simple concept; you can not improve what you are doing if you are always doing something different.

The first step then is to do the same work the same way every time, only then can you improve. Great, but how do you prove you are becoming “more” consistent, or that you have reached a level where you can say that you are consistent? If you are using one of the aforementioned methodologies, you are in luck as there is ample information and processes for you to use. If you are not, or as an addition, you can perform these measures yourself.

The key to consistency is adoption. You want to measure the adoption rate of the standards. Often this can be expressed in numbers or percentages. Numbers are good to show raw progress while percentages show the increases in terms of penetration. Since we are a PMO, we will be measuring how well Project Management is being adopted within an organization, so some measure here might be:

• # or % of Projects with Project Charter (or plan, schedule, etc.)
• # or % of Projects with an assigned Project Manager
• # or % of Projects using standards
• # or % of Departments using PMs in their projects
• # or % of employees trained in Project Management

You get the idea – find out what your management means by “consistent” and start to measure that. Of course, by measuring you will improve adoption and hence consistency. No manager wants their VP to ask them why they are not using Project Managers in their projects when everyone else is. Conformance is a powerful motivator. The nice thing about these metrics is that they are binary, either you are doing this or you are not. Your job as PMO director is to capture the individual components, aggregate and report. Not too tough, but very powerful.

A warning here, like with all measurement, you risk becoming seen as the police. Don’t be a tattle tale; consistency is a great way to work with your peers to help them adopt Project Management. As you collect the numbers, you will notice that this or that department is a little behind or is using less than another. This is your golden opportunity. Go to that manager, show them the numbers (BEFORE YOU PUBLISH), explain how the numbers are derived and suggest ways to improve. Say something like: “If we were to assign Dan to these projects that would bring you up to 90% of your project with assigned PMs.” They may not be your biggest advocate, but no one wants to be at the lower end of the curve. Do not “enforce”, help, assist, find ways to make them successful.

Building Your PMO – People, Process, Tools – Part II – PM Processes

(Apologies for the shortness this week - life and work keep interfering )

Well, you are building a PMO, so you’ll be expected to come up with some Project Management procedures. There are a plethora of great procedure sets out there that cover everything you can imagine about Project Management, they usually come with their own documentation and form sets. Your company probably already has some standards or processes that you will want or need to include in anything. Again, below are my ideas and thoughts, suggestions only, I know many of you have had different experiences, please share them.

Start Small.

This is pretty generic and universal advice, so I’ll go quickly. Whether you are starting from scratch or have some existing material, start small. Most of you know this one already. Don’t try to impress by inundating your organization with rules and forms, they’ll rebel. For the first time around, I would use very light processes and forms – maybe a charter, schedule, action items/issues list, and meeting minutes. Have your PM do all these so that no burden is on the sponsor or other team members. You’ve got good PMs, just trust in that, they’ll get the job done, and that is what counts.

What to do with Existing PM Standards?

This can be a real problem. Management may be looking to you to implement these standards, or to enforce them. Personally, I did not get into this to “enforce” anything, so I would begin negotiations with the objective of starting small and controlled and building on. In all likelihood, the package or set of standards you start with will not fit the way business is being done. Use this to encourage a process by which you start with a subset and add on as needed.

One company I worked for had purchased a very comprehensive set of Project Management and software development standards and procedures. There must have been 200 or more forms. The product was available on the intranet, and the project manager was expected to go and select the methodology they were going to use and then use the forms and procedures associated with that methodology. The methodologies were all based on software, and they were pretty specific – web based, mainframe, client-server, purchase, etc. I am sure that you can guess what happened. Since there was no PMO or procedure for using the tool, PMs just picked out what they wanted, used that and then copied the documentation from one project to the next. Everyone was “using” the tool, but the only similarities ended up being the fonts and the title pages. IMHO, that was because it was too complex. That is one reason why I advocate people, processes and then tools.

So, take whatever you have, boil it down to the essentials, then take half of that and start. You should not have any problem convincing people to use less, except maybe those who are invested in the tool or process. Find them, and get their help and buy-in, make them a part of this. Be careful that you are not perceived as wanting to slay a sacred cow, if all of this is new, then you can use that as a starting point. Things like “I need to start small so I understand everything” will go a long way here.

Next time, I’ll talk a little about build or buy options and how to move from processes to tools

Building Your PMO – People, Process, Tools – Part II – Processes – Forms

First, let me express my general distaste for forms. While I can’t say I hate all forms, I do believe that many organizations have used them incorrectly and created situations that are more harmful than beneficial. I do believe that the right forms can be very useful and beneficial. For one thing, every time I get on an airplane, I become a huge fan of the pilot’s pre-flight checklist. However, I don’t think I want my pilot filling out a form during a crisis – I’d rather they were flying the plane. That said, I think that by following a few guidelines and understanding the nature of forms, a PMO can use them to benefit the company and the PMO!

Forms Tend to Grow Rather than Shrink.

I will not say that I never saw someone remove a field from a form, but how many times have you filled out something on a form and had absolutely no idea how it got there, or what it is for, but you have to fill it out! I could scream. If you are going to create a form for anything, start as small as possible. I’m a fan of the “one page” school – fit it all on one page. That forces you to decide what is important and drop the rest.

Now I did have one team member who thought that meant to decrease the font until it all fit on a single page – no really. This is the same guy that gave me a 91 page screen design – yes ONE screen with 91 pages of documentation. Laudable in some ways, but I could not see the customer reading it and signing off, so in my infinite generosity I instructed him to cut the size by half, making it still twice as large as the other screen designs. Well he just printed the darn thing on both sides of the paper. Surely there is a level of the pit reserved for these people, but I digress.

Here’s a real frightening thought. Your forms may be around for a long time. Not only do the darn things grow, but they seem to be immortal. What will your form look like five years from now? I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be nice if it was just as useful then as it is today. Start with this in mind; be careful not to incorporate temporary jargon, or the types of things that will require maintenance over time. Some examples are the names of departments or people, use instead the role that the person will be playing (project sponsor, project manager, etc). As a general rule, wherever possible, don’t put anything, when you have to put something make it as self-explanatory as possible. If you have to explain your form now, image how it will be in five years. Don’t image, take a look at some of your company’s forms.

Never use Two Forms where one will do.

I think that if you build a form with the idea that everyone who sees it hates it, and wants nothing more than to not fill it out, you will have a good start. Double or triple that, and rather than help your customer meet their goals, you’ve create a lifelong enemy. Fewer and less and above all, please don’t require the same information in multiple places.

I recently moved and got a new doctor. I ring the bell, wait until they slide back the opaque glass and acknowledge my existence. Upon seeing me, the nurse hands me the every popular clipboard (provided to her by the makers of Viagra) and a pen (compliments of the makers of Levitra). “Please fill these out” she says. So, with odd feelings of inadequacy, I shuffle to my seat with the enthusiasm normally reserved for my dentist and begin. Moving through the process I discover that there are 7 forms that I need to fill out – ALL 7 ask me for my name, address, city, state, zip and phone. Three ask me about my “emergency contact”, they all require my SSN and signature – I can’t go on, I’m having flashbacks. If you think this is frustrating, think how tired your customer is of having to enter that stupid 14 digit “project number” on every form! At least I care about my address and emergency contact. Don’t ask for the same information more than once.

One great example of how one team I was on used this principle is that we created a form for the project initiation. This was just to get things kicked off, get a sponsor and a PM, that kind of information. This form next became the project Charter by the addition of a few sections giving more information about he project, team, scope, etc. The charter then goes in front of the Steering Committee for approval, once approved, the charter then grows into the Project Plan document. Now, I know this is an example of a form growing – which I said is bad, but no duplicate information is required, the document grows in proportion to the stage and complexity of the project, and no one is having to fill the same thing out multiple times. I think this is a great approach- we also use this for meeting agenda and minutes – the agenda becomes the minutes by the addition of a section. There is then only one document to store.


DIY – Do it yourself.

OK, want to keep your customers from hating your forms. Fill them out yourself. I’ve advocated doing the work yourself before, and the reasons are the same. How can they complain if you are doing the work and they are getting the benefit? Certainly some will complain that you need to be “working” not filling out forms, but that’s a whole different problem. Aside from delivering value at a low perceived cost there is another benefit to you (the PMO) filling out your own forms. You certainly will not want them to be as simple and easy as possible.

Try it, I’d like to get that nurse to sit in his waiting room for 6 hours writing their name and address again and again. I’ll bet they would figure out a better way! Just like you will. If you and your team are intimately familiar with your forms, as only those who use them constantly are, you will find ways to make them as efficient as possible. That incentive does not exist when you graciously provide others with the forms. Even asking is not enough. They are probably too busy filling out forms to tell you how to do it better. If you and your team are using the forms daily, those forms will become models of efficiency – trust me!

Building Your PMO – People, Process, Tools – Part II – Processes – The PMO as a Professional Services Organization (cont.)

Standards

These are not the PMI or QA types of standards; I’m not referring to making sure every project has a charter. There are certainly great ones out there and some that will work for you but I’m talking about standards for you, your PMO and your team.

I believe that everyone wants to achieve more, by setting standards for your team; you challenge them to do better. Also, standards create a personality for your PMO. If everyone on your team can be expected to meet a high level of professional standards, then the same can be said of the PMO. Unfortunately, if one member falls out, you’ve got trouble – but that’s why you got into management right?

As an example, let’s take the value of Teamwork. How would you set standards for this? You set standards as expectations, some ideas:

· We help when asked – we are never “too busy”
· We always treat each other with respect – particularly when we do not agree
· We are here for the success of the organization, the team and each other. Only by helping others succeed can we succeed.
· We will share our ideas, experience, knowledge and problems with each other.
· We are never alone.

I’m sure there are more that you can come up with – I’d suggest a small number of standards for each value. The standards help define and communicate the value. I deliberately used “we” in all of these to help communicate the teamwork even more.

Since you have set standards, you have given teeth to your values. Your values are not slogans or sound-bytes; they are something that everyone on your team lives. If your behavior is not going to match your values – forget it. If these standards only apply for your friends or – worse – for those in power, forget it. I have seen too many people who set their behavior standards based on the size of a person’s office. I have nothing but contempt for that kind of behavior.

Understanding

So we have values and standards, how to ensure that everyone (all your stakeholders) understand them. You want to make sure that not just the team, but everyone associated with the team understands your values. When your customers know your PMO will do what is best for them before grabbing for some personal gain, you become valuable.
Understanding of your values and standards will establish the identity of your PMO. You are as your customers perceive you. I won’t get into the whole “perception is reality” thing, but perception is understanding. By acting according to your standards, you create the reality, perception and understanding that you want. Your PMO is too important to leave this to chance.

You will also need to communicate your values and standards. I’m not a fan of big posters or plastering slogans all over the place, so how do you communicate?
First, you communicate by how you act. For example, what does it communicate when a project is rejected because it is not written on the latest version of the Project Charter? Not teamwork, that is for sure. However, when you cut and paste the old Charter into the proper form and work with the sponsor to fill in any missing elements, you send a clear message that you will do what it takes to make your sponsor successful.

Branding your PMO is important in giving it an identity and helping people understand. Think about any popular brands and what that brand means to you. How quickly you can understand values by simply thinking of the brand. Wal-Mart is low prices, Disney is fun, Nordstrom’s is service and so on. You PMO will have a brand and identity whether you like it or not, best to make sure you have the one you want.

Good old written and verbal communication is part of the mix too. How do you communicate the success of a project, by giving accolades to the team members or crediting the PMO? Do you freely share information, or do you hoard it? Do you seek feedback; do you talk with your stakeholders constantly? Lots of good communication help out there from all walks of business, use it.

Management

Now the ugly part, you’ve got to manage all this. Standards provide value only when consistently applied and enforced. Quality can only exist where it is measured and required. Training is effective only when planned to achieve a goal and tailored to each individual. All this means a lot of work for the manager, so some ideas:

· Tie the standards to rewards and penalties. You can not be serious if you are not willing to reward and penalize behavior. Reward is easy, but penalize is vital. If you do not take appropriate action when values are violated, you’re sunk.

· Train your team in what you expect. Don’t just lay down a standard and say “meet it”, help them meet it. Give your team members sufficient time and training to achieve the standards. You are creating elite professionals. Olympic-level athletes train constantly, even more importantly, they think and analyze their performance. It will be no different for your team. I’m not talking about sending them off to a 3 day course and marking the “training” box complete. Training is ongoing and career long.

· Align your individual goals with the team goals, which are in turn lined all the way back to the company goals. Clearly link the work of each team member with the success of the company. As a PMO you are probably already doing this for all the projects, just do the same for the people. Knowing exactly how you are contributing to the success of the company (and yourself) is a great motivator – particularly for the type of people you are hiring.

· Feedback, feedback and more feedback. High performance individuals want to know how to perform better, don’t expect that they will “know” that what they did is good or bad all the time. Your team will be making mistakes and they will be hitting it out of the park – you need to be there both times. Spend the time to take a careful look at how the event came about and in the former, work to avoid it and in the latter, seek to repeat.

If there is any way to do it, create a significant performance-based component to you salary plan. Not just on-time, on-budget, on-scope, but also including teamwork, personal growth, and contribution to the PM culture that you are trying to build. One performance goal we used was for each PM to design and give a one-hour class (lunch and learn type) on a Project Management topic at least once every quarter. This got the PM some time in front of audience, let them prepare a class; learn more about a topic and share that knowledge with others. This was a real win for everyone involved.

I haven’t talked much about the customers / partners yet, and not to slight them at all. I really believe that your partners hopefully are the key to the PMO success and the success of each individual. Here I’d like to suggest something off the beaten path and that is to have your partners provide key input into any review or performance evaluation / compensation for you and your team. This can be pretty scary, and unconventional, but let me give some reasons:

· It is really all about the relationships you build with your partners and your ability to work with them towards mutual success. If they are not successful, you can not be. Feigning success because you delivered exactly what was asked for when your partner is unhappy is rude, unprofessional and dishonest.

· Your partners are vital to your success, what better way of telling them and showing that you mean it than to give them direct control of your success? You will never be a “them” when you share your success this directly. If you can somehow tie your success to your partner’s even better!

· It places you in a vulnerable position by showing you trust your partners. Vulnerability is a key component to trust. Partners will never trust you if you can not show that you trust them. This is a great way of showing you trust them. As always, this isn’t a trick or gimmick – you must be sincere and ready to take the consequences, if this is only a token amount, then don’t bother, it has to be a significant amount of money.

By tying your values, goals and objectives directly to performance, you give them teeth and meaning. No one is confused about the value of money and this is you voluntarily placing your money where your mouth is. Just be ready, lack of commitment in any form will invalidate this strategy, and worse lose the trust of team members and partners.

Building Your PMO – People, Process, Tools – Part II – Processes The PMO as a Professional Services Organization

For the most part, PMOs are staff organizations for the most part. We are a service only unit within the company. We are often perceived as not producing value and many people are less-than-enthusiastic with the forms, methodologies, “bureaucracy” and “paperwork” that we produce. On the flip side, in Circle of Innovation, Tom Peters advocates that “all value comes from Professional Services”. The value of your PMO is in the people who represent it.

We’ve talked about how to put your team together; the next thing is organizing and managing them. Quick word on my management philosophy - I believe people want work to be meaningful, they want to succeed, and they want to be part of a great team. Our job is to put the pieces together to make a great team.

In his book True Professional , David Maister uses to the term professionalism to encompass the ideas of pride in work, commitment to quality, genuine desire to help, and dedication to the interests of clients. (Everything I have read of his has been wonderful – I highly recommend him). Using this as a basis, we can evaluate some of the components of professionalism.

The first component of professionalism is competence. One must have the capability to perform the required service or create the required product to be a professional. If you can’t do the job, you are probably not going to last long, although I have seen some consultants who… well – not us, and not our PMO.

Next component is attitude. A professional is not here “just for the money” they demonstrate care and commitment. Care is the key here, if you and your team do not care, everyone knows – fortunately you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t care, so that’s a done deal.

Finally professionals have character. There is a set of core values that they consistently demonstrate by their actions. If you cannot be trusted, your in trouble and will be very ineffective. If your customers don’t trust the PMO with their projects, portfolio or team, you cannot do your job. Again, not a problem for us personally, but we do want to make sure that the team has all these attributes in abundance.


Implementing and Managing Professionalism

So how do we get started – obviously the right people will make this a walk in the park (that’s why it’s people, process, tools), but even then you cannot take any of this for granted. I suggest you start with a set of core values. These values must be clearly communicated not just in words, but also through consistent actions. Values cannot be sacrificed to any form of expediency, they are not a fall back position or something to put on your card. If you show that your values are flexible or inconsistent, then you loose all trust and who wants to be like that anyway! Some suggestions on values:

· Teamwork
· Commitment to Learning and Continual Improvement
· Adherence to Standards
· Quality
· Customer Satisfaction
· Communication
· Intolerance of unprofessional behavior and results

Your set will depend on what makes sense for you and your team. We all have different values; different priorities for those values. The important thing is that we remain consistently faithful to our values.

Regardless of your PMOs specific values, I think that implementing and managing a professional organization falls into three main areas. First, professionalism requires a set of standards for behavior, performance, learning, quality, communication and service.

Next, we want everyone associated with the PMO to have the same understanding of these values and what is required to meet acceptable levels. This understanding can only be gained through a combination of training, education, coaching, counseling, and experience.

Finally, like everything else, professionalism must be managed. Progress and performance must be managed by making adjustments, encouraging improvement, and discouraging non-compliance. These activities fall within the purview of management – your job.

Building Your PMO – People, Process, Tools – Part I – People (cont.)

Assuming you now have the list of qualifications, skills and characteristics of the type of person you want for your PMO. The only problem is that you don’t know how to find these people. How do you get the right person and not be fooled in the interview? Not only that, maybe you have 3 openings, but what mix is right for you and your PMO. We’ll save organization for later, for now a little about how to pick make sure you get the right people. There are a lot of tactics and a ton of good information is available, make use of it! As a general overview, these are some of my thoughts, as always if you have any ideas, post them for others to read.

Use Your Network: You probably know some good people already if you are part of any professional organizations or have kept in touch with friends and colleagues. Even if they aren’t the right people, they probably know someone who knows someone. Your network is probably the best place to find someone. Your friends would not recommend someone unqualified (well, let’s hope not), and you have a great chance of finding a “diamond in the rough”- someone who is better than their resume. There are a lot of good PMs out there looking for the chance to be part of your PMO. I have to recommend Ask the Headhunter, I have subscribed to Nick’s newsletter for about 6 years, and even when not looking for people or a job, the advice has been priceless. The newsletter and column focus on the job seeker more than the employer, but there are some priceless words of wisdom for anyone. The site is a gold mine of advice, you will not regret it! So stealing a key point from ATH:

Get Them to Do the Job: This is tough; in the past we have done simulations which are fun for all by the way. You can give the candidate a problem to solve, but my absolute favorite was “the project meeting.” One of the PMs in our group had a really harrowing meeting where just about everything happened, and he was quite challenged in just getting through the session – which he did. Anyway, we used this meeting as a simulation. Before the interview (after a phone interview usually) we arranged for the candidate to come onsite for some face-to-face talks. We would send the candidate some project documentation telling them about the history of the project, their role as the project manager, and other details about the meeting and the project status. Then, when they came in for interviews, we scheduled a meeting where the PMO members played the part of the project team and the candidate was the PM. We each had a role to play, one of us came late, one was constantly checking his PDA, one was constantly trying to bring up their issue and hijack the meeting, and so on. The really good thing is we have all been in exactly that kind of meeting. Frankly, most candidates were a little lost, but you could tell who knew what they were doing and who didn’t. Also, those who did their “homework” were obvious, as were those who didn’t. If nothing else, this tells you who is serious about the job and Project Management.

Constantly Recruit: One of the most frustrating experiences is to finally get that personnel increase approved only to have it pulled after you are almost ready to make an offer. So what I’ve found to work is to be constantly on the lookout for great people, and to be recruiting all the time. This way you will have a short list of people to choose from and can make the “official” part of the process as short as possible. I do not want to sound like an HR basher, but I have found that HR is generally not interested in you getting the best candidate; they are more concerned with legal and procedural risks and issues. Your objective would be to make the internal part of the hiring process as short as possible. This means you have to do a LOT of prescreening, you might even want to “interview” people from around town by inviting them to lunch and sharing ideas and experiences. Heck, maybe you will want to work with him or her. Another constant recruiting method is to get out there in professional organizations, so your network helps here too.

“Trust your Feelings”: Use the force. If you do not like something about someone – listen to those feelings. Don’t throw someone out solely because of what you feel, but find out why you feel uncomfortable. One good way is to talk it through with someone else. We try to do interviews with two interviewers. While one is talking / listening, the other can observe the interaction. Maybe the person with you saw something – you pulled back when the candidate asked about overtime and vacation. This way when the two interviewers talk immediately after the interview, you can share impressions and probably find the reason for any uneasy feelings. I’ve found that there is almost always a reason I feel uncomfortable about someone, and if I talk with someone, we can usually figure it out. Once you have a tangible reason, you can make a better decision.

OK – four again. Next time I’ll talk a little (maybe a lot) about organization – how to organize the crack team you’ve put together!

Building your PMO - People, Process Tools - Part I - People

I want to suggest that there is an order to how you develop a PMO, and probably any organization, and the first step is getting the right people. Then you develop the processes and then tools. Of course this is an iterative process – not waterfall, but if you do not have the right people, forget it.

I won’t go into the logistics, as a manager you’ve probably already done this a million times. The right skill set is important, but that is very dependent on your situation and what you need. I firmly believe that you can teach people almost anything in terms of skills, as long as they are the right people. I think the right people for a PMO need to have a few important characteristics.

A Passion for Project Management: This is hard to find, but easy to detect. If you are doing multiple interviews, you will find this. One way to see it is to get them talking, if they can’t stop talking about PM, they love it. You will need people who are excited about what PM can do for a company. Passionate people are infective and you want everyone on your team to spread the virus of PM and PMOs. Each team member is the PMO every time they say or do anything. You’ve met these people. For a great example, just watch a Discover Channel documentary on some archaeological dig an listen to those archaeologists talk about a piece of rock or a skull. Or watch Antiques Road show when they have a really great find. They shake and can barely hold still enough to talk, and everyone else is thinking – “It’s just a rock for Pete’s sake” – but to them it is something so much more! And somehow to you that rock becomes so much more. That is exactly the type of person you want on your team.

Independence: Your team will often be out on their own, they need to be able to stand up to a lot of resistance and sometimes abuse. Personal independence and strength of character are vital. The last thing you need is a team member going to the customer location and caving in or saying things like “OK, we don’t really need a charter if you don’t want one.” One technique I’ve used to help PMs in the field to help them in situations like this is to have them tell the customer “I have to do a charter, my boss requires it, so if you would help me through this, that would be great.” That’s a less confrontational approach. How to determine if they are independent? I’ll talk about one in the “interview” section later.

An Open and Flexible Mind: Sounds like a yoga thing, but I hope you understand. I have had great PMs who could work independently, but could not get out of a rut. One of the worst situations is where the PM insists on following the letter of the law and not the spirit. Insisting that the customer must have this or that field filled out exactly this way is annoying at best, and it can torpedo your PMO quicker than anything. No one wants to be forced to do trivial work, and believe me, there are tons of customers out there who thing PM is trivial. That is what you are up against, so if your team can not focus on the vision and the goal and find creative alternative routes there, you are in trouble. Using the charter as an example, it is important that the document exist and that it serves it’s purpose, not that the cost benefit section contain an ROI over 5 years calculated using the corporate cost of funds at 6% and future value projections at 7% and so on. NOT TO say that your project should not have some kind of cost/benefit analysis!

A Sense of Humor / Perspective: This is something I always look for in employees. If they can not smile and laugh, frankly I’d rather not work with them. Additionally, I have found that people who do not have a sense of humor take things too seriously and tend to be closed minded. They also have a hard time at self examination, if someone can’t look at themselves and laugh, then they probably have a hard time changing. I hate to say this, but hey – it’s only work and most of us are not involved in life-threatening projects. The person who will pour themselves into their work heart and soul, but still understands that it is just that- work is the kind of person I love to work with. When you find these people keep them!

Four is enough for today - next I’ll talk a little about the interview process which is absolutely vital to finding these right people.

Building Your PMO - 10 PMO Books

Here is a list of 10 PMO (and portfolio management) books that have been recommended by other PMOers. I can't take credit for this; this is a compilation of books that I've collected, some from the PMO SIG, and some from my former PMI local chapter. I encourage any of you to post your thoughts on the books. I'll post my thoughts on the ones I've read too. Just to be clear - I am not personally recommending any of these (yet), but I know how hard it is to find good reference material. My first shot at links, so forgive me if that doesn't work.

J Ross Publishing has some freebies at http://www.jrosspub.com/

Advanced Project Management Office, The By: Parviz F. Rad, Ginger Levin
A comprehensive text that looks at function and implementation and covers the complete project management office in a simple format that is easy to read and understand. The author did an outstanding job focusing on the project management process, including project performance and competency. While many industrial organizations are becoming involved in project management, The Advanced Project Management Office will guide project practitioners into the world of success.

Project Management Office Toolkit, The By: Jolyon Hallows
The Project Management Office Toolkit shows you exactly how to apply project management structures to your company's core function, starting from the ground up. This book includes a CD-ROM containing every essential form you need to successfully complete a project, as well as more than 50 worksheets, templates, charts, and descriptions needed to establish a project office, set standards and organize new information.

Running the Successful Hi-Tech Project Office By: Eduardo Miranda
This is your complete how to book on establishing the Project Office as a methodology for managing multiple development initiatives within your organization. The book presents the PO (Project Office) as a model for use in a wide variety of organizations, especially in R and D environments. As more and more forward-looking firms adopt the project form as their preferred way to organize development work, the need for you to coordinate the use of scarce resources and align initiatives becomes quite..

Project Portfolio Management By: Harvey A. Levine and Max Wideman
Project Portfolio Management is an increasingly hot topic in New Product Development, IT, Pharmaceuticals, R and D and Engineering. Harvey Levine has compiled the first guide to help program managers and managers of project offices sort through their existing projects and create a healthy portfolio of projects that will lead to increased ROI for the organization. Levine answers the following questions:

Project Portfolio Management By: James S. Pennypacker, Lowell Dye, Eds.
Selecting the right projects to work on is critical in gaining a competitive edge in today's marketplace. Learn about portfolio management tools, techniques and methods in this collection of articles from leaders in the field like David Cleland, Robert Cooper, Thomas Saaty, David Frame, Steven Wheelwright and others. Case studies and best practices show you how others successfully manage their portfolios.

Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO By: Gerald I. Kendall, PMP and Steve C. Rollins, PMP
Covers the strategy, tactics, and processes needed for successful project portfolio management. It discusses how the PMO can effectively influence project teams and their team members to consistently seek out delivery acceleration opportunities and/or delivery threats relative to their work, and the overall mission of the project team. It also provides a detailed plan for both strategic planning and a PMO, reviews the most popular EPM tools and provides a way to evaluate PMO implementation using..

Using the Project Management Maturity Model: Strategic Planning for Project Management, 2nd Edition By: Harold Kerzner, Ph.D.
Using the Project Management Maturity Model, Second Edition is the updated edition of Harold Kerzner's renowned book covering his Project Management Maturity Model (PMMM). In this hands-on book, Kerzner offers a unique, industry-validated tool for helping companies of all sizes assess and improve their progress in integrating project management into every part of their organizations. Conveniently organized into two sections, this Second Edition begins with an examination of strategic planning pr...

Project Management : Strategic Design and Implementation by David I. Cleland and Lewis R. Ireland (Hardcover - Jun 10, 2002)

"There is nothing permanent except change," advised Heraclitus of Greece in 513 B.C. Project Management: Strategic Design and Implementation, Fourth Edition, by David I. Cleland and Lewis R. Ireland, provides contemporary evidence that both change and improvement are the natural order of things in project management literature.

The EnterPrize Organization: Organizing Software Projects for Accountability and Success By: Neal Whitten. PMP
Neal Whitten presents a highly practical guide to software project management, using a model that builds on the strengths of functional projectized and matrix organizations, while reducing or eliminating their weaknesses. You will recognize proven and familiar ways to define key roles and responsibilities, while also discovering exciting new organizational ideas for software projects. Throughout the book, Whitten shares lessons that have a profound impact on your ability to draw out project…

The Complete Project Management Office Handbook by Gerard M. Hill (Hardcover - December 18, 2003)

"[I]f a reader wants to implement a PMO at the working level, The Complete Project Management Office Handbook is a thorough description of how to do it. Its well-defined project management continuum and numerous tables and function models provide detailed guidance for anyone, from the novice to the experienced project manager, to determine where they are in the project-management-office continuum and how to achieve their objective…[This book] is a comprehensive resource for creating or growing a PMO." -Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2005

Marketing your PMO - Field of Dreams v. Drug Dealer Approaches

I think we are all familiar with the Field of Dreams approach which goes: "If you build it they will come." Under this approach, if you build the perfect PMO or the perfect set of forms or the perfect methodology the world will beat a path to your door. Much like the final scene with lines of cars driving into Ray's field, there you will sit in your office with a line of people hungry for PM wisdom, methodologies, your forms that are paragons of efficiency and meaning. And then - hopefully you wake up. Remember, they have done without you are your "bureaucracy" just fine up to now. You may be lucky and you have the support you need to implement a PMO, and some people may actually recognize the benefit, but there are still a bunch of people out there that do not and too many of us will end up in organizations where there is passive resistance and lip service. Not only does it make the job harder, but it could result in a failure and a bad name for the PMO. I am sure there are plenty of you who work in organizations where PMO is a 4-letter word, and probably because someone tried to build one using the Field of Dreams approach and it failed. Worse, they could have been using the “take your medicine” approach where management insists that everyone use PMO methodologies – because it is good for them, and then proceeds to chase the non-conformers around the building with a teaspoon of PMO trying to catch them and make them swallow it. I am sure there is no one model that will work, so PMO builders need all the tools they can get. My favorite is the “drug dealer” approach.

This is a very simple approach. We (us PMO guys) know that there are many benefits to a PMO – I won’t reiterate them, if you don’t know, you might want to do some more reading J. The problem is getting someone else (the right people) to appreciate those benefits. So, your task is to first discover the pain point(s) of those people – your stakeholders. A good person to start with might be your most vocal opponent. Talk to that person – do NOT talk about project management or PMOs, work to find out what bothers them, what causes them pain. It might be that they never know what their projects are doing, and they don’t trust the people who tell them that everything looks good. Obviously, you need to find something that Project Management / PMOs can help them with. Once you have this understanding, you will need to do some work.

Figure out how a PMO and/or project management can help, and then do it. You have to be careful not to interfere, and you need to make sure that ALL the work is done within the PMO, do not cause any impact on the stakeholder or their team(s). I would suggest that some kind of report or information is a good way to go. In my case, we did an impact analysis of the current project load and what would happen if a certain project was added. Whatever it is, it needs to be something useful and here is the catch – the first one is free. Once your stakeholder experiences some of those PMO benefits, they will want more. As you supply the services or information to the stakeholder, the value will become apparent. By creating something of value, you also create something worth paying for. Whether that payment is support or work or budget, once the benefits are clear and experienced, you will find your work much easier.

Hope this helps.

Demonstrating PMO Value - Why Prioritization is Important

OK - everyone hates having to decide which project is more important than which. Frankly, I find that a little disheartening since setting priorities and direction is exactly what we look for in senior management. It seems that some senior managers (not the ones I work with mind you) think that everything is important and that their job is to get you to understand that and just "get it done." - Crap

Some facts:
1. Unless you are working at some idiot factory, there will always, always be more good ideas for projects than there will be people to do them. The day there are more people than projects, you might want to update your resume, because sooner or later management will figure that out.

2. Corollary to fact 1: YOU CAN’T DO THEM ALL – duh. I was in one meeting where I tried to explain this and was told that we would just hire more people if we didn’t have enough, so unless you have an unlimited budget, you probably can’t do all your projects – certainly not at the same time. If you tried to do them all, you would probably still be working on a punch-card to CICS conversion today.

3. SOMEONE IS ALREADY PRIORITIZING PROJECTS. Admit it, when a worker has 20 projects all equally important, what do they do? They do the fun one, the interesting one, the one that their buddy over there wanted, the one their boss wanted, the last one someone asked about….. Not the optimum prioritization method. Now image you have 10 people working simultaneously on 10 projects all equally important. What are the odds that any 2 people are even working on the same project at the same time (I know statistically the odds are good, but you get the point). So everyone works on whatever project until someone with some pull tries to get them all together on the “hot” project. We then drop everything, work that project for a while and the others languor in neglect until one of those becomes hot – this is not a logical prioritization method.

4. Sometimes, less is more, slower is faster…. There was an article that I read in the April 2004 PMI Journal - MANAGING THE IMPACT OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT DISRUPTIONS ON NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS by Robert C. Ash and Dwight E. Smith-Daniels(sorry it's a secure link, but PMI members can get to this) that studied the effects of switching between different work items / projects. Basically, the more you switch, the less you get done and the more time you need to re-familiarize yourself when you pick up where you left off. And the longer you are away the worse it gets. So, let’s face it multi-tasking is great but it has its limits. You can not expect to write 4 books at the same time if you switch after every letter. Maybe it would be better to write one book at a time, maybe 2. The problem is that today (my experience is with IT so I will use that as an example) the average programmer is supporting one or two production systems, has a few minor projects (“back burner”) and one or two major ones. That may be the perfect mix, but if it is, I haven’t seen any evidence of it. The more you switch (past a certain point) the more you loose. So our indecisiveness is expensive.

5. It takes longer to do many things at once than it takes to do many things sequentially (again within limits). Look at the book example. Have you ever decided to clean the kitchen and an hour later you’re in your bathroom picking up dirty clothes? The kitchen is still dirty, the bathroom is not much better, and you’re frustrated because you just can’t seem to make any progress?? Just like work. What would have happened had you just stayed in the kitchen?

So where do these fact lead us. The conclusion is that our current method of not deciding and trying to do everything at once is expensive and inefficient. Now here is my thought – you don’t need to prioritize, just do fewer things. You can try this two ways:
Actually prioritize projects – think “to do” lists. Lots of political work here, but ultimately you want people doing the work that is most beneficial to the company, so getting the whole portfolio thing up and running will be a boon, but it takes a while and it is very difficult. Which leads to my second alternative
Just make a list. As the PMO Director, just make a list of all the projects (if they are all equally important, then it doesn’t matter which is first – right). Publish the list and tell everyone that this is a list of projects in priority order and that if they are working on more than one of these projects, then they should give all their time to the highest until they have completed their work and move down the list. Of course that’s not going to work, but it will point out the need for consensus prioritization. No one will disagree that everyone should be “on the same page” or pulling the oars together, or whatever your teamwork slogan is.

Demonstrating PMO Value - Aligning Work with Objectives

Aligning Work with Objectives

by: Derry Simmel, MBA, PMP

Copyright 2005, Derry Simmel, All Rights Reserved

Companies today are looking for more ways to make the most of every dollar. They have long had objectives and goals, mission statements and vision. These inspiring words are designed to motivate team members and encourage all departments to combine forces and drive to success.

Unfortunately, too often these finely crafted words end up as little more than banners and plaques next to the elevators or on the company website. Cynicism aside, most organizations are dedicated to achieving the objectives, but the gap between objective and project is often uncrossed. With all the best intentions, companies today are still spending resources on projects that will have no real impact, or worse, projects that are causing harm.

As the Chief Project Officer, you bring unique capabilities and advantages to the company by being able to make this important connection. You can demonstrate the value of the work being done by connecting the work directly with the strategic objectives. This approach also sets up mechanisms to measure and report on the contributions of the projects.

This article is not a step-by-step guide to project alignment, and does not address mandatory projects. We will however discuss ways of creating an environment favorable to successfully making the connection between strategic objectives and the projects.

Some of you will have project alignment thrust on you; others have been trying to sell the process for years. In either case, this is a priceless opportunity and one that will not happen twice. If you are not already, this activity will make you and your team an integral part of corporate strategic management.

A few tenets that form a basis for the process are below. While these may seem obvious, they are often ignored when decisions about projects are made. By understanding, communicating and incorporating these tenets into the connection process, you will find your task easier.

1. Every project a company executes either contributes to that company’s success or its failure. There is no in-between; a project that “does no harm” uses corporate resources that could be better spent on a project that contributes to objectives.

2. All Projects are NOT created equal. Every project contributes differently. It is not in the company’s best interest to treat projects “equitably.”

3. There are more good projects than there are resources to do them. The corollary to this is you can not do them all. Many companies try to do too much, resulting in missed dates, quality problems, etc.

4. Not all projects contribute to all objectives. It would be nice if everything we did contributed to every objective, but they do not and they will not. It is acceptable to have a project that doesn’t contribute to one of the objectives. It is even possible, and reasonable, to have a project that goes against one of the objectives.

You will have far greater success if these ideals are accepted by those involved in the process. Next, you will objectively, transparently and simply connect strategic objectives with the projects in your portfolio. It is vital that the process be demonstrably objective, transparent, and easy to understand.

The process must be objective. If any part of your process is perceived as partial, it is over, do not pass go, do not collect that bonus, go directly to obscurity.

Your process must be transparent. If it is not, it will be perceived as secretive. A secretive process must be biased - see “partial” above.

Your process must be simple (easy to understand). You can not explain a difficult process in an elevator speech. Most people are not going to pay attention to a long explanation, resulting in lost interest and commitment.

Your process will consist of three main components, the objectives, the relationship of each project to those objectives and the overall portfolio results.

Objectives:

Projects are going to be measured against objectives. You want to know not only whether or not a project contributes, but how much it contributes.

Objectives that are not clearly understood will yield conflicting results. While everyone in the group knows what “Customer Satisfaction” is, they rarely agree on that meaning.

Like projects, not all objectives are created equal. It is more important to comply with the law than it is to write new job descriptions. Understanding this and the degree of difference is important. I suggest that your process indicate not only the ranking of each objective but its relative importance or weight. Saying objectives are ranked 1, 2, 3 is not as informative as saying that objective 1 is 300% more important than two and two is 1% more important than three.

Projects:

Here we are looking at connecting objectives to projects, not determining validity of projects. Some projects may have strong connections to objectives but be cost prohibitive or just not feasible. Connectivity or alignment alone is not sufficient for determining the viability of a project.

You will need some way of evaluating each project against each objective. There are a number of methods that can be used; you may even want to use different methods for different objectives. As long as you use the same method for the same objective for every project you can expect consistent results. Remember the principles of objectivity, transparency, and simplicity discussed above as you build and use this method.

As with objectives, I recommend that you establish the intensity of the connection. Projects that are highly aligned with corporate objectives would be more valuable than those that are loosely aligned.

There are many fine examples of techniques available in books, articles or white papers. Most portfolio management tools come with some form of connectivity/alignment process as well. Some research, knowledge of your organization and your own experience will lead you to the system that works best for your company here and now. As with all such things, start small and simple, prototype, change and evolve.