Enterprise PM Excellence and the PMO ..!

Having spent a career full ensuring successes of all different components of the enterprise project management, learned a lot of tricks of the trade as well as trends and patterns for what works or is likely to work compared to what doesn't work or is unlikely to work. For example, depending on the experience of the leader/manager, the individual organizational initiative is more likely to succeed. e.g. a good portfolio, program or project manager is more likely to succeed. Succeed, I mean adhering to the compliance and meeting stakeholder expectations. I didn't mean an ideal success nor a true potential one. To my experience, project management in general hasn't quite reached anywhere close to what I call a "straight line success", i.e. an ideal success. A lot of variables affect the level of success, however two major elements are 1) enterprise project management maturity, 2) macro projectonomic advances. For a given organization, 2 above is less likely to be an area of influence, however, 1 still remains pretty much part of the organizational growth cycle.

Let's look at a small hypothetical example first. A portfolio manager negotiated periodic ROI goal of 25% for an anticipated investment of $1B. What if the portfolio manager achieves 24% vs. 25% vs. 26% ROI for the period? 24% ROI will negatively affect executive goals by $10M. 25% will just achieve, whereas 26% ROI will add $10M extra to the business value growth. And we are just talking about the difference that the 1% improvement can make. Imagine, 5%, 10% or 15% improvement gained instead. Then what about its sustainability going forward?

Maturity:

That is where the enterprise or organizational project management maturity comes into play. It is for that very purpose, enterprise/organizational project management organizations (PMO) are established. Often it is observed however, that PMO stream is either too passive or too active. Passive enough and executives find it inefficient enough to call for a PMO refresh or even recovery at times. Active enough and P3 managers start rejecting, eventually leading to PMO isolation. No wonder why we see the need to refresh/recovery of PMO every couple of years. In fact, there has been a trend and accepted norm to do so to keep the PMO relevant. Even worse, some newly setup PMOs don't even help mature organizational project management (OPM). That leads to a critical question, "What is organizational project management maturity" and "How can it be so difficult to elevate it?" Well, in simplest form, OPM maturity refers to the level of project management successes enabled for that of the organizational success.

Difficulty:

The difficulty of OPM maturity improvement results from multiple causes. For example, lack of executive support, low maturity of PMO itself, misaligned or outdated PMO, resistance, complexity, technology and amongst others is the PMO influence and integration with P3 managers and undertakings. You might not have heard much about this last one, because generally there are multiple causes at play and there is the conflict of cause that hides the underlying influence and integration issue. And that is not all. Depending on the power share, empowerment, governance framework and organizational culture, the needed PMO influence and integration may not get naturally restored. Right PMO leadership can not only remove barriers and resolve issues but create organizational strength, right from the PMO.

Excellence:

In absence of the benchmark and/or right leadership guidance, PMO generally settles for low value efforts (e.g. templates, documentation, technology introduction etc.), and as you would have guessed, scope reduction, funding cut, downsizing are the outcomes, until one day, executives decide to fix the PMO. This pattern can be cyclical, especially in low to mediocre performance organization.

Right PMO leadership can correctly sense the organizational nerve, align PMO strategically and tactically, inject efficiency by transforming entire project management organization through meaningful, direct and minimal efforts. Such PMO's roadmap will have prioritized high value efforts (e.g. standardize, create efficiencies and high degree of predictability etc.). Keeping endeavors simple, yet relevant and result oriented. When PMO is performing effectively, the OPM matures too, creating organizational strengths that improves with OPM maturity. About that earlier example of financial metric as the strategic criteria, well, the higher the OPM maturity and we can expect sustained higher ROI and with maturity uplift.

How about you? Any experiences worth sharing?