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2 Everything You Wanted To Know About PMOs (in 60 minutes)
3 Introduction What is a PMO? A Brief History of PMO ThinkingWhat Do PMOs Do? Resourcing PMOs Evolution and Opportunities APM PMOSIG Q&A
4 Stuart Dixon PMO Manager – AXA PPP healthcare Secretary APM PMO SIGContact:
5 A PMO is what the organisation needs it to beWhat is a PMO? Lots of acronyms! The industry is settling on “PMO” as the catch-all phrase Does it matter what it stands for? A PMO is what the organisation needs it to be Activity (question to the audience) to get people to share all their acronyms First question – how many people are PMs? Second question – do you belong to a PMO? Third question – how many people are not PMs but work in a PMO? Final question – what do you call your PMO (polite answers only!) ? – some of which are below: PSO – project, programme or portfolio support office PPSO – project and programme support office PMO – project, programme or portfolio management office PjMO – project management office PgMO – programme management office PfMO – portfolio management office P3O – project, programme, portfolio office DMO – demand management office DSO – decision support office (port mgt) CoE – centre of excellence BSO – business support office PO – project, programme, portfolio office If rapport is good – can say that the worst acronym of all is PMO = pisses me off (when said by a PM) Don’t do the builds until you’ve done the interactive bit…. Does it matter what it stands for – not in the widest sense, but to each organisation, very much so, as we’ll see later.
6 A Brief History of PMO Thinking4000 B.C. 19th Century All of these were achieved without a PMO…. Or were they? Pyramids – Khufus pyramid in Egypt – 1.3 million blocks, each 2.5 – 15 tonnes – started prior to 2000BC and 2000 years before that pyramids were built in Mesopotamia Pont du Gard – 1st century AD – takes water from Uzes to Nimes, 50km and only drops 17m over its length, Carried 200m litre of water per day. Ironbridge – first iron bridge opened Around that time you could look at other engineers doing big stuff (Wren – St Pauls, Brunel – ships bridges and railways etc) London Underground 10th Jan 1863 first service – 20,000 passengers a day between Paddington and Farringdon Street – the Metropolitan line The bit to stress is that massive engineering works were completed that would have had some kind of organisational structure, planning, administration, controls, learning mechanism, communications etc etc. Surely there must have been some form of PMO forerunner?
7 A Brief History of PMO Thinking1900 1970 Projects carried on delivering, and still needed “support” to be effective Project management started to be formalised as a discipline – engineering and defence driven Major projects like the Titanic (maybe not the best example of a great project) and the Manhattan skyline started to need some real discipline due to the huge number of people involved in the projects, and the complex interdependencies Gantt (1910), PERT (1958), Critical Path (1950s) all originated in this period as tools that helped plan the sequence, timing and resourcing of projects – note though at this point all of this work was still being done in very manual, labour intensive ways – quite often in the massive drawing offices associated with the engineering giants. IPMA (the International Project Management Association, to which APM is affiliated) and PMI (Project Management Institute) established in late 1960s, bringing the first professional activity to project management, the seeds of project management as we know it today were sown and refined in this era. Projects carried on delivering, and still needed “support” to be effective, but….
8 A Brief History of PMO Thinking2000 IT becomes a major disruptor – suddenly the number of things that need to be managed as projects goes exponential! In the 1970s, IT started out as Data Processing, and became instantly the villain and the saviour of our industry. Machines capable of doing thousands of calculations a second totally revolutionised the complex maths behind pert and critical path analysis… BUT, and this is a big but… IT started to drive demand for project thinking to satisfy the massive IT projects, both hardware and software, that started to emerge – a self-fuelling cycle?
9 A Brief History of PMO Thinking2000 Frameworks and methodologies emerge out of the IT industry: 1975 – PROMPT II 1989 – Prince 1996 – Prince2 Includes paragraph on Project Support! Fuelled by the massive increase in demand for IT projects the UK government sponsored methodologies emerged… PRINCE2 is derived from an earlier method called PROMPTII and from PRINCE project management method, which was initially developed in 1989 by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) as a UK Government standard for information systems (IT) project management; however, it soon became regularly applied outside the purely IT environment. PRINCE2 was released in 1996 as a generic project management method.[2] PRINCE2 has become increasingly popular and is now a de facto standard for project management in the UK. Prince mentioned project support for the first time… the PMO was starting to be recognised formally!
10 A Brief History of PMO Thinking2000 ISEB PPSO Handbooks ISEB PPSO qualifications PPSOSIG born! In 2000, David Marsh, one of the Prince protagonists, wrote the ISEB (the qualifications arm of the British Computer Society) PPSO handbooks. PPSO stood for “project and programme support office” and the books detailed work that the good support office should be doing to help projects deliver. At the end of the first PPSO course that David taught, he was asked “What happens next? How do I get further help to do my job?” The result was that PPSO SIG was born and PPSO people had an outlet for what was looking increasingly like a career…..
11 A Brief History of PMO Thinking2000 2010 PPM Centres of Excellence created across public sector 2004 onwards P3O published in 2008! An OGC publication all about PMOs. PPSOSIG becomes PMOSIG and celebrates 10th birthday, decides to join APM In 2004, the OGC PPM Centre of Excellence documents came out, and government departments were targeted with setting up CoEs. This was a response to the embarrassing failure rate of public projects. The reasoning was that if you can standardise the way projects are tackled, ensure that PMs have the infrastructure they need readily available (no reinventing wheels) and also become serious about project assurance (via the OGC Gateway reviews), then projects stand a better chance of delivering without frittering away the taxpayers contributions. Clearly, there was an organisational construct required, and this is really the start of the maturation from support-centric PSOs into guidance and results-centric PMOs. In a faceless office block in Basingstoke, a very nice lady called Sue Vowler was starting to distil her passion for PMOs and PSOs into some fantastic structured thinking, and in 2008 the OGC published her P3O (Project, Programme and Portfolio Offices) guidance, aligning nicely with Prince2, Managing Successful Programmes and P3M3 (Project Programme and Portfolio Management Maturity Model) to create a coherent set of publications for organisations wanting to be better at managing change. P3O was a major breakthrough for us bring the following into the spotlight: Recognises the contribution that PMOs make to project delivery success in the longer term A P3O model provides a decision enabling & delivery support structure for all change within an organisation Legitimises PMO as part of the PPM profession The big new one – P3O started talking about portfolio offices. This really has changed things as we’ll get to discuss later. But for now, it’s worth recognising that P3O was the inspiration behind getting a portfolio management publication written, and in 2011, Management Of Portfolio was born to wide critical acclaim. PMOs became strategic as well as supporting and guiding. In another major change, PPSOSIG addressed the “elephant in the room” – the removal of the “S” recognising that support is still important to projects, but the action is in the guidance aspects of PMOs. Less than a year later, the decision had been taken to join the APM as a SIG to further support the direction that PMOs were going – there was a big gap in the APMs SIG portfolio, and we were ready to fill it!
12 You tell me! What Do PMOs Do?Now we’ve dealt with the history, let’s have a look at what PMOs actually do. An opportunity for attendees to call out what PMOs do in their own organisation – suggest seeding the question and allowing people to call out activity, asking some questions to gain clarity, and also soliciting for similarities from other delegates. Could record on a flip chart if available. Possibility to ask not just what do they do, but also what could they do and should they do? Depends on time available. Another angle is to ask for one or two anecdotes on “PMOs gone bad” – there are bound to be one or two. Danger of doing it early is that it becomes a time hog and makes it hard for the presenter to get back to a positive picture. Presenter's discretion! No judgement to be passed, as the next slides attempt to provide structure.
13 For individual projects & programmesTypes of PMO activity Admin support administration logistics log management schedules some lighter specialist functions etc Expert support scheduling reporting risk management config management communications facilitation These 3 slides are used as a backup for the previous exercise. It is recommended that the approach is to do the exercise, and then flash quickly through these slides – up to a minute on each one. The key thing is to talk very quickly about the types of activity and where it is directed (tagline at the bottom of the slide): Admin Support Expert Support Guidance Business Leadership The key thing to stress here is that there is a real diversity in experience, skills and abilities across the PMO. Draw out the differences in the 4 categories. You could ask the audience: “Where do you think people might come from for each of those levels, and where do you think they might go afterwards” – key things to draw out are: PMO people can come from a number of sources, careers, backgrounds and there is no preferred source PMO people get wide exposure, and especially at higher levels, PMO can be a career springboard to many things. For individual projects & programmes
14 Across all projects & programmesTypes of PMO activity Guidance – the Centre of Excellence implement, own and improve the methods, standards, processes and tools report on groups of projects and programmes internal delivery and standards assurance education, coaching and mentoring of delivery staff subject matter consultancy implicitly, this type of PMO activity has longevity, and lives longer than individual projects These 3 slides are used as a backup for the previous exercise. It is recommended that the approach is to do the exercise, and then flash quickly through these slides – seconds on each one. The key thing is to talk very quickly about the types of activity: Admin Support Expert Support Guidance Business Leadership The key thing to stress here is that there is a real diversity in experience, skills and abilities across the PMO. Draw out the differences in the 4 categories. You could ask the audience: “Where do you think people might come from for each of those levels, and where do you think they might go afterwards” – key things to draw out are: PMO people can come from a number of sources, careers, backgrounds and there is no preferred source PMO people get wide exposure, and especially at higher levels, PMO can be a career springboard to many things. Across all projects & programmes
15 For the CxOs & shareholdersTypes of PMO activity Business Leadership – Portfolio Office build portfolio management structures, tools, processes govern project and programme progress and fund allocation link corporate strategy to benefit and product delivery provide options and recommendations for the combinations of activities across an organisation provide metrics and stimulate discussion to allow company executives to balance investment risk and reward These 3 slides are used as a backup for the previous exercise. It is recommended that the approach is to do the exercise, and then flash quickly through these slides – seconds on each one. The key thing is to talk very quickly about the types of activity: Admin Support Expert Support Guidance Business Leadership The key thing to stress here is that there is a real diversity in experience, skills and abilities across the PMO. Draw out the differences in the 4 categories. You could ask the audience: “Where do you think people might come from for each of those levels, and where do you think they might go afterwards” – key things to draw out are: PMO people can come from a number of sources, careers, backgrounds and there is no preferred source PMO people get wide exposure, and especially at higher levels, PMO can be a career springboard to many things. For the CxOs & shareholders
16 A Bit of Role-Playing! LibrarianSo we’ve talked a bit about what PMOs can do – with the diversity that we’ve talked about, it’s clear that it’s hugely important how people in PMOs operate. Different situations require different styles, so for a bit of fun, we’re going to do a bit of role playing…
17 Pulling it all together - PMO CharterWrite one! What is it? What the PMO does What you can expect from the PMO (activity, service levels etc) What the PMO expects from you Socialise the charter with all stakeholders Measure PMO performance against it Review it regularly What is a charter? Here is a picture of the Royal Charter granted to the IED (Institute of Engineering Designers) earlier in 2012, and we’re hoping the that the APM Royal Charter is not too far behind! A charter is a number of things in the PMO context: A terms of reference A contract A promise The main point of a charter is clarity about expectations. It’s hugely important to understand who has those expectations, the organisations financiers (shareholders, board), the PMO staff, the project managers, the project executives – absolutely everybody who interacts with the PMO either directly or indirectly. The real value of a charter is to be clear about what your PMO currently does – this can and will change over time, so having a start point for the discussion is a real help. If you understand the cost of the various elements of the charter, then you can give the business good information to make decisions upon when funding has to be cut (although hopefully all PMO aspects show a positive return!), and let you find opportunities for PMO service expansion. A recurring theme we hear lots of is the awkward situation when you have to explain “the PMO doesn’t do that” to a stakeholder who has other expectations. Having a charter in place allows the conversation to shift around to “we could do this in addition to our existing charter, and it will cost £x”. Our experience is that having a charter is like having a plan, it becomes a source of reference upon which to build improvement through change.
18 The PMO Service Menu Mature PMOs often create a support service menu for projects to pick and mix what services they need (and pay for!) Taking the concept of a charter a little further, managers of projects don’t want to deal at that level, they want more tangible help. When dining out in France in the more rural areas, you come across the institution of the “plat du jour” or meal of the day. This can come as a shock to gourmets used to choice! In my experience, these plats du jour are invariably excellent food, but are rarely what you’d have ordered given the choice. And so it is with support functions too… as a project is a “unique endeavour”, in order to be effective it needs to be able to optimise responsibilities, working practises and expectations. This is where the concept of a PMO Service Menu comes from. Imagine at the start of a project that the project manager is handed his menu of available support activities, together with a price list. He has the choice of services, combinable together, at a known cost. He can look at what the project needs (i.e. his palate), the volume of support required (i.e. his appetite) and even how he wants it delivered (i.e. stew, casserole or to paint the French variant fricassee). For those moments when all that is needed is standard support, but needs to be onboard and running quickly, you have the equivalent of MacDonalds – the “Pop-up PMO” which arrives with tools, resource, templates and above all the experience to deliver a standard service quickly. The more mature PMOs realise that “one size doesn’t fit all” and puts measure in place to be able to satisfy the support needs of a wide variety of projects… do you get these options? If not why not? Maybe that’s a great way to start off the conversation (as long as it’s done constructively!) with your PMO…
19 Resourcing Your PMO The big things to consider:Align to your service menu, in terms of capability of individuals and capacity The law of diminishing returns – how much PMO is enough? How you resource your PMO will depend on the Charter and the Service Menu. PMOs need to be very sensitive to the quality of their staff – good people can make a difference to a number of project simultaneously. A big questions for most PMOs is how much PMO to do. There is a massive amount of value possible, but as with everything, the law of diminishing returns means that at some point, you have to draw the line and not any more activity to the service menu. We cannot give much guidance on this, it’s individual to every organisation. A good PMO manager will be able to push right up to this point though.
20 Resourcing Your PMO - CareersTraditional path of project support – junior project manager – senior project manager etc. Works well for some but… Turning it all on its’ head… PMO can be a career step for a project manager! Use “the bench”! Remain clear that capability is the glass ceiling, not background The philosophers will ask the question – what is a career these days? It used to be clear – an upward trajectory that was guaranteed to prove the “Peter Principle” (in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence) and break a few people in the process, either the “Peters” or their victims. It was almost like a game of snakes and ladders… In the days of project support, it was the burning ambition of every project analyst (or whatever they were called) to work up through the ranks to become a work package manager, then maybe even a junior project manager. This path is still very much available. But now that PMOs are thought leaders as well as supporters, it’s clear that experienced project delivery staff need to be central to the guidance-level PMO. This is where PMs need to consciously think about whether their next career step is another ladder, or can they make a real difference by taking a role that in the past might have been considered sliding down a snake. Many PMOSIG members have been project managers, successful ones at that. They have consciously decided that PMOs are great places to work, a real outlet for their hard-worn lessons in the school of hard knocks to be put to positive use, and above all else a very worthwhile career move. Just to reiterate that, current contract rates for PMO Managers and higher than for similarly experienced senior project managers… One approach that we have seen work particularly well is to maintain a rolling assignment to the PMO for PMs who are just coming off a project for a short period of reflection, recuperation and recognition. Yep – recognition for the expertise they have gained in the least project, and giving them a responsibility to help the organisation learn from their experience. This is a fantastic way of embedding good practise. We’ve seen PMs come off their sabbatical in the PMO completely re-energised and ready to do their next project. In fact the real limiter to whether anybody, PM or PA, will be successful in a PMO is their soft skills. This should play well to PM skills… but isn’t always the case. Technical ability (in a project sense) is important, but the ability to influence, enthuse and improve is what PMOs are about – are you and your PMs up to the challenge?
21 Evolution and ChallengesRefresh Empty Change Value The P3O refresh has just been commissioned. PMOSIG is in a great position, as we have two members on the authoring / reviewing panel. We expect the next version to deliver better insight and value for organisations serious about improving their project delivery capability. The APMs Body of Knowledge is also due for a refreshed publication in Spring 2012 (have to be careful about when this presentation is delivered!). We do not consider it is structured properly to allow PMO aspects to the topic areas to be addressed – we were not involved early enough in the process to influence it. New project practises are emerging all the time, and it’s clear that PMO thinking is not keeping up at the moment – for example the Agile movement in software development has some major issues for PMOs and these are only starting to be considered. These become more prevalent with PMOs moving more and more into the guidance space. PMO thinking needs to accelerate to keep up. The general business climate in the western world is not particularly healthy. We’ve already seen businesses start to take short cuts in their project delivery practises. This is totally opposite to what PMOs stand for, so PMOs need to engage with the “lean” agenda and become very sensitive to the business imperatives and demonstrate value at every stage of their activity, or they will be the first casualties. Overhead is very easy to see on a balance sheet, value much less so… Finally, the whole PPM industry is professionalising. The APM has a the Registered Project Professional designation available to members, and hopes that this becomes approved by the Privy Council to become the Chartered Project Professional in This is great news, but we need to be very clear that PMO professionals have every bit as much impact on project delivery success as project managers, and therefore we need to ensure that there are paths to RPP for PMO people. Chartered?
22 The APM PMOSIG We’ve talked a lot about PMOs during this session, we’d now like to tell you a bit about us! From earlier slides, you’ll know that the PMOSIG has been around in various guises for over 10 years, PPSO SIG, independent, PMOSIG, and now part of the APM. This evening, you may have also got a bit of a flavour for how we like to operate… here are some words that we like to use to describe us
23 The objectives of the PMOSIGTo facilitate collaborative learning that fully engages the membership and helps them grow their PMO skills and competences To reach out to other disciplines (audit, finance, procurement, quality etc) that collaborate routinely with PMOs to create value To provide an open source of unbiased advice and guidance to those who can benefit from putting PMO practice to work To have a bias towards action, understanding the latest thinking and quickly digest it into ways that can be shared with those we seek to help These are the management words that support the last slide. We feel it’s really important to both be playful, and to be recognised for having real substance… just like the PMO charter, we want to be clear about what our members, the APM and the wider industry will get from us. [don’t spend much time on this slide]
24 Our community – member profilesPMO Practitioners, defined as people who enable, support and ensure the management of change in organisations Those who need to know more about PMO and its benefits, practices, tools and techniques People in leadership positions who need to understand the potential benefits of the PMO approach People in organisations who are tasked with performing the ‘bridge’ function between strategy and delivery, either in a portfolio setting or in various dispersed units throughout the organisation Walk through these - suggest that it’s a relevant topic area for PMs as they will very likely be part of a PMO in one way or another. The diversity is seen in all the following dimensions: Admin, support, thought leaders and business leaders Industry sector, including public, private and third sectors Practitioners Theorists Trainers Consultants No typical PMO person = no typical PMO!
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26 Topics We Have Covered All with a PMO “angle” The McCartney Report P3ORecovering failed projects Politics and the PPSO Benefit management & realisation Personal development Tools, techniques and Approaches PMO Leadership P3O Sweating your PPSO assets PMO and PPM Maturity Competence and Competencies Portfolio Offices Centres of Excellence Business-driven PMO The McCartney report was a 2003 report into government project effectiveness - The previous slides shows a montage of images from past conferences – the underlying themes are energy, interaction, challenge and expert input. Our “happy sheets” show that conferences are universally loved by the attendees – good value for money, and very stimulating. We put a lot of effort into theming the conferences, attracting world-class speakers and making them relevant to the current trends in PMOs and the PPM world. All with a PMO “angle”
27 Plans for 2012 2 Conferences 6+ local meetings (Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Milton Keynes, Reigate, London) including branch presentations Continue with Social Media activity 12 Newsletters Knowledge Management project White paper with Portfolio and Programme Mgt SIGs Scottish National Conference Best Practise Showcase PMO Leader of the Year award Spring and Autumn conferences. Local meeting along the lines of branch meetings – early evening events with one keynote speaker and an opportunity to interact with other PMO enthusiasts. KM project – trying to bridge the gap between the theory and practise, and especially the artefacts and templates that don’t seem to be readily available in the public domain. This activity, which we’re running as a project, has the potential to address the APM BoK shortfall, create a P3O appendix D that stands the test of time, and to create a practical legacy that will benefit all who touch PMOs. The PMO Leader of the Year award is a joint initiative with Peter Taylor (who wrote The Lazy Project Manager and Leading Successful PMOs) and Gower Publishing
28 Any Questions?
29 How to contact us: [email protected]@pmosiguk APM PMOSIG group
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