The Overbearing Weight of Massive Process
Ben Eckwahl, PMP, PMI-ACP
Managing Partner at Phase Zero Partners | Project Manager | PMO Builder | Specialist in bringing simplicity to complex projects |
This is the fifth article in our series on solving common PMO issues.
If you have been following our series so far, we have covered a few different issues that hopefully you either don’t have or have resolved.? At this point in the journey, we have tackled ensuring you and your business lines have a clear idea of what value your PMO brings, you are actively mentoring, and you have a process oversight method in place.? Now we tackle evaluating your current process to ensure what you are doing brings value to your team, and your organization.?
How it happens?
In our PMO experience processes are frequently added and rarely subtracted. Every good idea in project management comes with an attached process or artifact that gets added to our day. Rarely do we get a forum to review and decide to remove things that have been implemented. Often when we question the value of a process the answer is along the lines of “Well, our CXO really likes this one report in this format, we need to keep doing it, even though it's a duplicate of the information in this other report."? Without active management this sort of process and artifact growth can get out of hand after a few years.?
One of the common issues we wrote about in our introductory post to this series was “An overabundance of process/artifacts”. This issue leads to project managers being buried under the weight of the processes required by their PMO. Once this happens, depending on how consistent the process oversight of the PMO is, you end with a couple problems:?
What we recommend?
When we have worked with PMOs on building or modifying their process approach the greatest success we have is starting with a greenfield exercise at the leadership level.?
Simple enough to say, we know it is tougher to get the right people engaged to participate, much less come to an agreement.?
Once we understand the end goals and immediate problems we start to prioritize. There are a many tools we use to prioritize problems and map out your solutions. What really matters is getting to the end of the exercise with an understanding of what you need now, what you need soon, what you would like later, and importantly, what you can eliminate.?
Once you have that process/deliverable prioritization mapped out there are a few key points of evaluation:?
Next, we map that prioritization out into an incremental approach to implement PMO process (which leads to artifacts). Our goal is to build a plan that emphasizes focusing on one to three new concepts at a time.?
Putting it all together
An example of this is the simple phased approach we recommend for “first” project managers.? These are the first project managers in an organization that are hired to manage projects with no existing structures in place.? Our phased approach tackles the tactical project management work first and then transitions to the portfolio level.?
?Phase 1 – Ensuring your project teams clearly know what they need to do
Phase 2 – Enhanced planning and communications?
Phase 3 – Basic PM Maturity?
Phase 4 – Portfolio Management – A focus on building a strategic process to prioritize new projects?
The goal is to take on each of these phases as a defined unit of work and practice.? We recommend spending at least 60 days in each or the first two phases to build the habits and knowledge needed to be able to execute them consistently and efficiently.?
Hopefully this illustrates the iterative approach we have seen work well.? In your case a given phase may be implementing two process enhancements and eliminating some unnecessary work you found in the evaluation.? The key is just to keep the total number of changes small enough that your team can successfully build new habits quickly.?
How do you manage keeping your team from experiencing process overload??