Establish a PMO Roadmap

The difference in a winning PMO is determined by a roadmap plan created at the beginning. Whether a departmental PMO within a business unit of a company, or an enterprise-focused organization, leaders will do well to understand the full scope of the plan before committing their teams to the endeavor. Whatever form a PMO takes, planning tends to start with a definition of the governance framework.

I was once asked that if I were to build a PMO for a company, “how long would it take?” I politely indicated that was the wrong question. Given that I did not know what pain points existed, what the management team wanted to accomplish, our how value was to be measured, I could not answer. The right question would have been, “how would you go about defining and building the PMO?”

All the improvements cannot be done at once. More simply, one cannot just assume that a whole-sale improvement to capabilities is needed. This includes people, process, and tools. The best PMO’s cultivate an approach of overall governance and strictly adhere to it; thus, it is in their power to succeed. With the overall approach defined, a roadmap for success can be plotted, executed, and delivered effectively.

One of the greatest challenges to a PMO comes from the concern that too much overhead will be required. Too many controls, too much paperwork, too much governance, and too many required project management deliverables will all contribute to slowing down delivery, crimping creativity, or preventing the nimble response options that executives crave. I saw one blogger note that PMO sometimes stood for the Paper Management Office. In the third decade of this millennium, PMOs are seen to be antithetical to Agile. This wide-spread perception is wrong… or at least it should be wrong. It points to the lack of flexibility in PMOs to adopt their methods. Instead of building all improvements, the PMO should define value and then implement with minimal viable bureaucracy. Like the Agile Minimal Viable Product (MVP), minimal viable bureaucracy helps to keep the PMO from coming on too strong in trying to govern too much, for too many, with little adoption.

In my experience, when disciplines and governance are not put in place delivery teams find it more difficult to follow. Borrowing more from the military, PM disciplines are command and control.

Command and control are the implementation of authority and direction by a properly designated leader over resources in the accomplishment of the mission.   That sounds just like what many PMOs do: they exercise their authority in the direction of resources to accomplish delivery. To enact better this authority, some definition is required. There are so many variations of PMO that one can become confused.

Whether labeled command and control or governance, these terms are still somewhat ambiguous. The next step is to put some meat on the bones and clear up the ambiguity. In addition to detailed project planning, governance is defined by:

• the inclusion of processes and methods for oversight and control
• the escalation and resolution of issues, risks, and conflicts
• the frameworks for clearly establishing visibility into the initiatives and streamlining decision-making
• the art and science of defining and implementing metrics and measures to gauge progress and performance of the command structure (i.e., PMO)

Once the lines of command and control are established, the next step to ensure victory is to develop a roadmap. The exercise of creating a roadmap is not about the plan itself. It is about the information gathering and vetting, raising the level of understanding for stakeholders, and ensuring critical thinking is part of the organizational design initiative. The creation of a detailed, step by step roadmap is not simply academic. I do not create these plans to demonstrate my PowerPoint skills and planning capabilities nor to make the certified project managers involved on the project feel good. These plans include milestones, integration points, critical success factors, capability definitions, and incremental “wins” to demonstrate value. (Given its perception as overhead, wins are critical to moving the PMO forward.) The roadmap is crucial for articulating and delivering a project management organization that has a chance of making it past PM Solutions Research noted two years.

Look for more in the forthcoming 2nd Edition of Delivery Effectiveness.