Efficient, Flexible and Cost-effective Options are Influencing Project Management.

A sit-down with Michael Lee, our Executive Vice President of Project Management Office/Operations from Judge Consulting Group, to discuss how and what options are influencing project management decisions.

Mike, let’s start with some basics. Why should an organization hire a PMO SME versus a full-time employee?

By using a PMO SME, there's a lot less risk in terms of onboarding and spend when hiring PMO FTE(s). If you're bringing on a full-time employee, you never really know what you're getting until that person starts. There's always some level of risk and for an organization to hire a full-time employee and to take on that risk, the financial impact can be much greater, than hiring a PMO SME through the many flexible engagement models available. So, for us, if you're consulting with us or you have a project where you have a technical team in place, or you have any of a number of project components in place in terms of roles, but you don't have a PMO, we have experts on our team that can be hired on a contractual basis who are very well versed in the PMO best practices. If it's an agile project, if it's a waterfall project, if it is a Kanban or any hybrid methodology, our team can go in and out of an organization at any time. So, I think your risk of onboarding and finding the right fit goes down quite a bit from a business perspective with a Project Management SME to get things moving.

Then of course you have the process expertise that goes in behind it. My team is not industry specific. We are not product specific. We only hire Project Managers that can take a process and apply it to several industries and several products. They are used to going in and out of different environments and different cultures. Culture fit is important. Bringing a consultant in, that consultant knows, that it is their job to fit in. If you hire a full-time employee, they may or may not be a fit. And you may not find that out for three months or maybe even six months. You may give them more time hoping it’s not a waste and you're sinking dollars every day into that full-time employee, and then having to go back through the process of hiring again if that person doesn't work out. So, putting the correct processes in place, onboarding efficiency, and flexibility, are all benefits of using a PMO SME from a team like we offer versus going right out and hiring. We eliminate that risk for the company.

I can see how hiring a full-time employee could cause some setbacks if it's not good fit for the project.

Yeah, but it's a risk/reward situation, right? What I mean by that is, if your practices and policies and mature enough, budget for a FT hire is not a concern and time to integrate them is not an immediate issue for you, then may be a great fit. But if you're not sure, or even not fully sure what type of model you need to run, or the company has not involved project managers before, we could work with the team in a more flexible model. Bringing us in and letting us get the project started until they have really worked the kinks out. We help with that from a consulting mindset and consulting perspective which keeps things on track along the way. Just getting that PMO SME in place, through a consulting company like us at Judge Consulting is where to start.

Have you experienced any big challenges as a project manager?

Yes, there definitely can be some challenges. Remember, we provide solutions. ?Sometimes our solution means that it is to engage one of our consulting project managers, but then we also will staffed PMs, or we'll do the managed staffing model where they hire, through Judge Consulting, a dedicated person for 40 hours a week, but we're doing the performance management and oversight for the role on our side through our PMO SME’s. We have experience and can find the right model.

But to answer your question, overall challenges being experienced while managing projects is that everyone is doing more with less time. As modern ways of working progress, that is the one trend that remains true. Everyone's trying to do more. There are more touch points, there are more people you're working with, and while growing/maturing companies OKR’s, the world has gotten smaller. Now we are often working across different time zones and so many different project roles with differing responsibilities. For Project Managers, what we need to focus on is making sure every role on a project is in alignment. So, one of the challenges we are facing is with Product Owner availability and the other is disparate responsibilities aligned to project team members. This can cause inconsistent decision making again because, it’s not the old way of there being a very structured environment that people are working in. It is a much more matrixed environment where they may be reporting to several different people, who have several different opinions. One day you get one decision from a Product Owner and the next day you get another. The ability to be flexible and the ability to be consistent with the decisions and agreements that are happening amongst the project team is becoming even more important.

It's somewhat of a “soft skill”, where it's not necessarily the question of are you a Certified Scrum Master, or PMI certified, SAFe experienced, or any number of traditional ways of measuring a PM skillset. The ability to maintain stakeholder alignment, team direction, and project leadership are all things that are really paramount in driving a project towards success. Being able to keep people, from the executive level down to the individual contributor level, who have a lot of different responsibilities and a lot of different things pulling at their attention aligned from the beginning of a project to the end of a project so that they see value in what you're delivering. That is an on-going challenge. That can be a challenge internally, for an internal team of your developers, into executive stakeholders of who you are keeping informed of the project, but it's also a big risk and big challenge that project managers face for external audiences and clients as well because their availability and the decision making gets pulled around quite a bit.

How do you think Judge Consulting handles those challenges better than other firms?

Because of our unique position, we have Senior Project Managers who have been doing this work for up to 20+ years here judge, and it's not 20+ years in Finance or it's not 20+ years in Manufacturing, they have done Project Management work across several industries, and they have seen the progression of that challenge that I've been talking about and they face that challenge themselves. The team is asked to be doing more, with less by clients that hire. But you still have the same amount of time, right? In some cases, you’re now being asked to deliver five or six different features at the same time. And our PMs are respective of that. We act on agreements, and proper documentation, we talk about what a retrospective may look like, and course correcting. Grooming processes, delivery models, product backlogs, constantly, every day, to align to scope, expectations, time, and budget constraints.?We talk about how you align challenges and problems to certain aspects of the project that speak more directly to the stakeholders that you are working with. Maybe its budget driven, maybe time driven, maybe quality driven, or even scope driven, whatever it is that's driving a customer or a partner of ours to get work done. Our PMs have to align the problems or challenges and show them, why it's having an impact on that driving factor for the work and forge a path forward with those agreements. So, experience for sure is something that Judge Consulting offers, varying industries and varying cultures that we proven success working in. We have to be very nimble, and we keep a staff on that is very quick and able to navigate in those environments.

How does that all fit in with a change of scope?

Reporting transparency and negotiation when needed and providing options. It's not just here's an issue and here's a change order; either execute it or don't. We work to provide options. If you take this path, here's what you're going to get. Here's what you're not going to get. For example, negotiation at times when it comes to challenges like budget constraints. Knowing how to drive against a minimum viable product release that and then once you see the return on that, we can implement phase two or phase three. All those skills go into that, in conjunction with my previous answer as well, and measuring the success of the PMO.

ROI is of course a big one. You want to state your goal at the beginning and align everything to that goal. Even if it's that 10,000-foot view of what product or service is being implemented. ?Did you get that application implemented? How did you do it? Did you stay on track, on budget? What bumps did you hit along the way? How did you change? Tracking all of that and showing stakeholders and executive sponsors and product owners that you did that, is the value they want to see.?We keep a senior staff on board to be able to navigate all of those challenges.

And with all the talk of artificial intelligence, is that affecting project management at all?

Of course, yes.?Core skills of people/team management and reporting keep us a bit insolated. However, you know, think about what we do, we manage projects and lead teams. = So, if there's any sort of AI to go along with that then we need to manage that as well. It can be something as simple as automated test scripts, or more complex AI that's extremely involved. We still must manage that, and we still have to recognize risks that come along with it. Now you don't necessarily have a person coming to you and saying, hey, I executed X number of test suites or test scripts and 15 of them went and two of them didn't with a human explanation of the results. Now, The AI feedback comes back more yeses or no’s, pass or fail.?Interpretation, reaction, and change control to address the outputs falls to the Project Manager(s) to address. ?

There are also tools out there that automate several things in Project Management like establishing initial frameworks for delivery that make it a little more efficient for us. At the end of the day, you still have to manage it. It's becoming part of every project. A machine executes against commands, and people execute against real time decision and practicality in a scenario. So, you kind of lose that real time adjustment. Now of course AI is getting better and better, and they're working that into it, but the AI is only going to be as good as the command that's given, and there's still a human factor around that.?

What do you want someone to take-a-way from this conversation?

I want to point out and that we provide flexibility, we can give you a person, a Project Manager, for 40 hours a week for a year. They would be dedicated, and you get that senior level person who could do all these things that we have discussed. But we can also give you a Project Manager for 10 hours a week for just two months to help get things rolling so that you set up a process and then hand that off to somebody if needed as well. We're not just here to have one solution or provide one way of doing things. We want to provide solutions for your problems, and we want to be a partner with you to make sure you get that solution from our PMO.

We are very flexible. I have a team and staff that can handle several things at the same time. And like I said, they've gone in and out of just about every industry, every product, and every culture that you can imagine. PMO expertise is important to project success.

A sit-down with Michael Lee , our Executive Vice President of Project Management Office/Operations from Judge Consulting Group, to discuss how and what options are influencing project management decisions.

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