One of the major stumbling blocks about understanding what programme management is, really is about the difficulty in focusing on benefits rather than deliverables.

With a single project – here we can take the definition of a project from the Fourth Edition of the PMBOK^® Guide -  “a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product service or result”, the focus is often on the creation of a product whilst balancing the competing constraints of scope, quality, schedule, budget, resources and risk. There is a tendency for the project manager to lose sight of the fact that there should be a supporting business case or similar document to determine whether the project is worth the required investment. The project’s deadline and budget are usually far easier to focus upon rather than the quality and scope of what is developed being capable of delivering the business benefits outlines in the business case! Read more

It is all about current state: OR If you don’t know where you’ve been, how do you know where you are going?

If you are ever faced with establishing current state to help with your metrics, consider the following diagram to guide your thinking.  Let me start with the Assess phase and break into the following three areas:

1. Assess individuals’ knowledge
2. Assess individuals’ competency
3. Assess organisational maturity Read more

Leaders of PMO’s, COE’s and Learning and Development departments have historically been willing to buy hope.  They believed that if they invest in developing the skills of their people (project managers, project team members and managers of project mangers) then the individuals will benefit and the organisation will as well—they were willing to buy that hope.  Nowadays, these same leaders are no longer willing to buy hope—they want proof.  Proof that the $500,000 they spent internally, or with a partner, to develop the skills of their people will yield at least that much in bottom line benefit to the organisation.  Even if they are still willing to invest, their CEOs are demanding that proof to approve funding. Read more

Quite frankly, I don’t know a project manager running a PMO who doesn’t want to get better and improve the value the PMO is providing.  How is this done?  Through evolution, but not the type described by the great Charles Darwin shown below.  In fact, Dr. Hobbs discovered a co-evolutionary process underway with PMOs; in other words, they not only adapt to their environment, they change the environment in which they operate.  Given this, let me ask, what part of the environment are you trying to change? Read more

I wrote in my last blog that we need to focus on bringing value, not just costs (after all, we do cost something to show up everyday) to our organisation.  So, how do we do this?  Well, first, let’s take a look at the concept of value.

Determining the PMO’s Value

Who sits in almighty judgment of what we do?  I asked that question to many people, including the members of the LinkedIn Group mentioned above.  Essentially, there are three groups that determine the PMO’s value.  They include: Read more

It is very clear to me that the interest in the PMO has never been higher.  Much to my chagrin I remarked to several colleagues more than five years ago, that the rising interest in the PMO was nothing more than a fad that would soon die out (not PMO’s themselves, mind you…just the “obsession” people have with them).  Boy, was I ever wrong!  One need only look on Amazon to see the number of books that have been written in the past five years alone (approximately 3800).  Attend any project management conference and it can be very difficult to get a seat at presentations on the topic.  You’d think Eric Clapton himself (my hero by the way) was performing there (I wish he were…a lot more fun than talking about PMOs!) Read more

And so we come to the concluding episode of our hypothetical PMO saga.

In our second examination of the PMO case study featuring “Company B” we projected how the company might address its project management issues by the creation of a professionally-staffed PMO (or two).  In our last scenario, we ended with the suggestion that with the departure of the incumbent Head of PMO, the next level of functional generalist – the Head of IS Implementation – would be elevated to Head of Project Management instead of one of the Heads of PMO?  Thus the organisation and reporting structures would remain unchanged as per the model below. Read more

Now, those of you who read the hypothetical case study in my previous Blog may be wondering what might happen to our two intrepid professional project managers – the unrecognised prophets of “Company B”. Read more

It is said that a prophet is never recognised in his/her own land.

Let me hypothesise a case in point.   Two professionally-qualified project managers working for an organisation (“Company B” in the representational Model #1 below), with turnover in the billions, write a paper detailing why its major projects keep failing and what needs to be done to address the problem. Read more