Never mind HOW to do ERP PMO, tell me WHY!
Once upon a time, there was a wonderfully handsome and amazingly gifted PMO, Governance and ERP expert who was about to write about HOW to set up an ERP PMO when a LinkedIn post popped unbidden into his feed and stopped him dead in his tracks.
?“There’s no point in explaining the HOW”, it said, “to folks who aren’t bought into the WHY.”
Reader, that PMO, Governance and ERP expert was me. Well, kinda. Maybe not the wonderfully handsome and amazingly gifted bit. Be that as it may, I didn't start with writing about the HOW, but rather accepted the challenge to start with the WHY, which I now share here.
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Why have a specialist ERP PMO?
?The three classic questions before investing in change are:
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Why do ANYTHING?
If you are going to start an ERP programme then, whether you like it or not, at some point you are going to throw your whole business up in the air and hope it lands right. Maybe more than once. And you are going to find out that you and your team don’t really understand your processes, your data, or your technology. So, doing SOMETHING feels appropriate, right?
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Why do THIS thing?
Why add expensive PMO resource to the mix? Well, there are many ways a PMO can add value, but here are my top 5 for an ERP programme.
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Why do it NOW?
Come on! You are doing your ERP programme NOW.
?If not now, when? If not ERP PMO, who?
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Still not convinced? Let's run through those five ERP PMO value-adds together right now!
ERP PMO Value-add #1: Provide standards and processes to ensure consistency of delivery
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Why do ANYTHING?
By my reckoning there are between 15 and 20 workstreams in an ERP programme, each working semi-autonomously, and involving multiple teams: core business core operations, business support operations, IT integration, ERP SI partners… the list goes on.
The likelihood that all these teams, who have never had to work together like this before, see the world the same way and speak a unified language is close to zero. And that makes understanding where the gaps and duplications are happening pretty difficult, until they manifest themselves as costly problems to dig into, analyse, unravel and repair.
So, let’s not do that. Let’s agree some guard rails up front that standardise how we work together and describe things. And I do mean “guard rails”, not “straightjackets”: we want to support all these expert teams so they work well separately and together, not micromanage them in some mythical Single Best Way.
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Why do THIS thing?
Why do we need an ERP-experienced PMO team to provide standards and processes across 15-20 workstreams staffed by client employees, SI partner employees and freelance experts?
Well: who else is going to do it? Your in-house folks don’t know the 3rd party work. Your 3rd parties don’t understand your business context. Generic PMO folk with no ERP experience don’t know how it all hangs together and where the bodies are buried. The pure play delivery folks don’t have capacity or the full end-to-end knowledge.
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Why do it NOW?
If we can establish this common framework and language upfront, we can place more reliance on the information we are using to track delivery progress, to recognise and escalate exceptions, and to support decision-making.
Conversely, if we get impatient and cry “never mind all this standards/ processes/ templates fiddle-faddle, bloody well get on with it!”, we are doomed to scratch our heads further down the road and wonder why we can’t get a straight answer when we ask why our status data is contradictory, our teams are bogged down in rework, and our partners are all pointing fingers at each other. And then we can pay a lot more to pause the programme and work out the common framework and language we needed all along.
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ERP PMO Value-add #2: Provide assurance, coaching and mentoring to build a competent workforce capable of first-class programme and project delivery
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Why do ANYTHING?
ERP programmes are delivered year in, year out, but for individual organisations they are often somewhere between a once-a-decade and a once-in-a-generation event. So, I mean no disrespect when I say we cannot expect that organisation to have retained “muscle memory” from 2005 or 2015 and have the right skills in the right places for a 2025 ERP programme.
Meanwhile the SI partner will often provide a mixed team with several strong anchor players surrounded by energetic but inexperienced youngsters, decent plodders and jaded hacks. This is not unusual and such a combined internal/external team can achieve great things, but the case for coaching and mentoring is clear, as is the benefit of assurance.
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Why do THIS thing?
What is the connection between an ERP-experienced PMO team and providing assurance, coaching and mentoring? Well, think of the PMO in this case as a partner and catalyst. Your SI partner can share their ERP standards and ways of working, your own people can explain how to get architectural alignment, but they won’t want to do it again and again.
So, they are supported by the ERP PMO – this stuff is bread-and-butter to us! – and we capture and collate their inputs as a re-usable joined-up ERP playbook that we can use for new team member induction and ongoing support. And while we can not assure our own work, we can do “2nd line” assurance* that teams are using delivery and governance templates, principles and processes as intended.
*I will cover the “lines of assurance” model in more depth in a later article.
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Why do it NOW?
The good news is you don’t need to do ALL of it now. At the start of an ERP programme we need a playbook for Discovery and for Design. We won’t need to cover Final Preparation, Cutover or Post-Go Live Support for a while yet. You have time.
?But you need to do SOME of it now, and once again there is solid benefit in engaging skilled and experienced ERP PMO resources who know how this stuff works and can both catalyse and amplify the diverse skills of your teams in a joined-up way.
Onboarding induction, cross-team orientation, proactive support and reactive help will accelerate team productivity and increase quality as you ramp up. Assurance will build early confidence that we are doing what we said we would and heading in the right direction.
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ERP PMO Value-add #3: Provide a ‘one version of the truth’ reporting function with management dashboards to focus decisions and management interventions
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Why do ANYTHING?
ERP Programmes are complex with many teams and sub teams, each with unique skills but each also with slightly (or grossly) different perspectives. We need to face this reality: there cannot be “one SOURCE of the truth” in ERP.
But that does not mean we cannot have “one VERSION”. To square the circle, we need a clearing house or “information factory”, where data from multiple sources is collated, analysed, and transformed into coherent and meaningful oversight information with insightful exception and decision briefings.
So, we need to do SOMETHING, agreed?
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Why do THIS thing?
What is the connection between an ERP-experienced PMO team and a ‘one version of the truth’ reporting function? The first part of the answer is easy: most people recognise that PMOs often support programme reporting. The second part is harder – why is an experienced ERP PMO the thing to do, if any old PMO can pull a report together?
So, here’s a story. A programme reported “Green/ On Target” for ERP Build, for Data Migration, for System Test, for pre-UAT Training – and then blew apart in UAT, with the programme going deep Red and everyone pointing fingers at each other. Why did that happen and who was to blame?
It happened because the testing team used artificial data for System Test, because the Data team was focused on getting Production Data ready for migration for UAT as they were asked. No-one was to blame, exactly. But:
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Why do it NOW?
If all you want from your reporting is “team A did these five things, and team B did another seven things, and, and, and”, you can start whenever you want. But you will need your skilled, experienced ERP PMO onboard from Day 1 if you want a single version of the truth that includes the sort of insights that put you in control.
Data, Environments, SME backfill, IT Support capability, Roles – there are several workstreams where you have way less time than you think, and your ‘one source of truth’ reporting won’t be true if your well-meaning generic PMO doesn’t know that. A skilled, experienced ERP PMO is great at digging below the surface, applying their knowledge and understanding to data analysis, and getting the real news report out in the form of a single version of the truth.
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ERP PMO Value-add #4: Reduce the likelihood and the impact of events that would have a negative consequence; and, conversely, increase the likelihood and the impact of events that would have a positive consequence
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Why do ANYTHING?
Usually, the organisation implementing an ERP Programme is either doing it for the first time ever, or the first time in a decade or more, and has lost whatever implementation knowledge it ever gained. The ERP SI partner will usually have more recent experience, which is great, but ERP-the-system makes up maybe 30% of ERP-the-programme.
That leaves 70% of the programme with little feel for lessons learned, whether “Things Gone Wrong” that we want to avoid, or “Things Gone Right” that we’d like to repeat.
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Why do THIS thing?
What is the connection between an ERP-experienced PMO team and ‘reducing the likelihood and the impact of events that would have a negative consequence’ and its converse? In this case, there ARE other things you can do – for example, contract non-SI external resource for specialist work like Data, Business Change, or Delivery Assurance.
None of these good responses preclude ALSO hiring an experienced and capable ERP PMO team with knowledge of typical failure modes, worthwhile accelerators, and tried-and-tested safeguards.
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Why do it NOW?
Honestly, the sooner the better. A lot of avoidable ERP programme problems are baked in at the start. The ERP PMO understands ERP lessons learned, both bad things to avoid and good things to repeat. Engaging a skilled, experienced ERP PMO team can ensure the whole programme leverages these lessons.
Given the likelihood that early (pre-Mobilization) resource budget is tight and appetite for externals at this stage is low, consider engaging ERP PMO expertise part-time during Discovery, perhaps for 1-day-a-week knowledge share or one-off assurance engagements rather than 5-days-a-week delivery.
If you can’t make that happen, consider running risk workshops and looking at your Quality Gates as a way of catching known risks and failure patterns as early as you can.
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ERP PMO Value-add #5: Identify, understand and manage multiple and cross-cutting risks and issues
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Why do ANYTHING?
An ERP Programme is a hotbed of multiple uncertainties – although this is probably not how the vendor sold it to the client!
You will experience every part of the RAID acronym.
In all honesty, I’ve never found it hard to persuade people to do SOMETHING about ERP risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies.
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Why do THIS thing?
What is the connection between an ERP-experienced PMO team and ‘Identifying, understanding and managing multiple and cross-cutting risks and issues’? After all, a good non-ERP PMO team will often do a very decent job of reactive RAID identification and management.
The justification for hiring experienced ERP PMO folk is not that nothing will otherwise be done. It is, in my opinion, that reactive RAID management is likely to be too little, too late. ERP-seasoned PMO professionals bring that additional dimension of UNDERSTANDING and can proactively hunt down and destroy the seeds of overlooked risks, poor assumptions, likely issues and hidden dependencies.
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Why do it NOW?
As so often in ERP, the justification for early action in PMO RAID management is to minimise the amount of risk that is baked in at ERP programme start – or even earlier, while the original Business Case was being worked up into an ERP programme proposal.
There are plenty of disaster stories in ERP but not all that many surprises, if truth be told. It's like a clichéd disaster movie:
Disaster moves are fun to watch but no fun to live through. So, get your ERP PMO on the job now and shoot a nice documentary about safe buildings, harmless sharks and profitable cruise liners instead.
Sources
I took the P3O Guidance from Axelos as a starting point. P3O stands for"Portfolio, Programme and Project [Management] Offices", and covers PMOs of various kinds. The guidance features a "why have a PMO?" list that covers 12 reasons or justifications.
For this article, I picked the 5 reasons or justifications that seemed most useful in an ERP Programme PMO. If you disagree, add or remove as you see fit!
#ERPPMO #UsefulPMO
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