How an Organization’s Culture Affects its PMO Style

Huge shout out to the Procept Associates Ltd. team of @Kevin Aguanno, Mark Kozak-Holland, PhD, BSc, IPMA-D, PMP, Cert.APM,CMP and Hussain Bandukwala . The PMO Summit was filled with amazing content for project managers that focused on Project Management Offices and their challenges.

Kevin's presentation of Having a Business Benefits Focus: the Key to PMO Success was spot on how to shift the mindset towards benefits based thinking away from task based thinking. The approach where deliverables become key and tasks are managed to achieve the deliverables.

Hussain then led a panel of experts to discuss the real world challenges facing modern Project Management Offices.

Mark's presentation The NextGen PMO: Project vs. Operational Governance Mindsets used lessons from history to demonstrate how project Management started with a benefits approach of innovation centuries ago and how the industrial revolution created an operationally focused Project Management mindset that focused on efficiencies and incremental change. Then he provided methods to alter the mindset by changing Operational Expense funding to Capital Expense funding to support the realization of benefits as discussed earlier by Kevin and the expert panel. So in effect by the end of the presentation Mark was able to show that project management discipline is shifting back to its roots of new ideas, innovative disruption to organizations from which project management has it roots all the way back to the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

My presentation How an Organization’s Culture Affects its PMO Style focused on the issues facing anyone trying to build a Project Management Office as it relates to the culture of the organization, the PMO, the Project Manager and ultimately the Project.

The presentation was based on a research Paper;

A Relational Typology of Project Management Offices (February 2013)

Ralf Muller, Johannes Glucker, Monique Aubry

Project Management Journal Vol 44,No. 1, 59-76

The lens was on the culture and roles of Project Management Offices to understand the perspectives and driving forces of the competing groups.

Is the project "brave new world" or is it "rinse and repeat". The PMO has to engage the stakeholders early to ensure that new innovative projects need to be addressed and measured differently. The "lift" of one time only events have to addressed in relation to the skills required to "carry" the engagement past the project close date to truly realize the benefits of the engagements.

In the absence of leadership, lead was a key message to anyone implementing a project or building a Project Management Office.

In conclusion, the PMO summit was able to demonstrate that modern Project Management Offices are at a cross roads. Do they continue down the operational exploitation of the triple threat of Time, Budget and Scope or do they explore the unknowns in the engagement to flush out opportunities and benefits to be realized when the engagement is complete. How to exploit slack to gain new insight and report back to the stakeholders of benefits known and newly discovered.

It was an honour to be part of such a summit. Thank you again to all the presenters, the panelists, the support teams and for the audience for their insights during the discussions.

#pmo #benefitsrealisation #projectmanagement #leadership