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Amidst all the talk about the value of project management offices (PMOs), maybe organizations should be looking at size.
 
"PMOs do not have to be big", says Ardi Ghorashy, PMP, PgMP, a partner with 80/20 Consulting Inc., Markham, Ontario, Canada, told me in a recent interview.

"The biggest mistake I think that companies make is that they create a monster organization with a lot of overhead and they also bring all the project managers to report into a PMO. That creates a big lump sum of cost sink that becomes very visible at the executive level every year when you review your finances.

Then the question will always get asked, 'What's the return value on this investment.' And project management has traditionally been very difficult and notorious at quantifying its ROI.

... By its nature, a PMO has such an encompassing impact on the organization that it affects a lot of things. You can't really measure it very easily. .... These days we say PMOs need to be implemented extremely thinly. [Thin] PMOs will demonstrate the value very, very easily."  

What do you think? Are "thin" PMOs the way to go?

Organizations that have a project management office (PMO) show they are moving toward a centralized management of project resources and strategic alignment to business goals.

But I find a certain level of readiness has to exist in an organization for it to create the platform for a worthwhile and cost-effective PMO--the type of PMO that contributes to the business not by simply being an extension that offers extra resources, but that works and evolves with the business.

There are key issues in organizations that usually hinder this:

•    Senior teams do not understand the PMO or its purpose
•    Senior management teams do not understand what project management is all about and how it can help them lower the costs of implementing projects
•    The PMO is viewed as something you install without careful and business-aligned planning

In my mind, PMO implementation must be viewed and managed as a project. A company should know why it's seeking to implement a PMO in their organization, what business issues it's trying to fix and what inefficiencies it's trying to improve.

A company has to consider:

1.    Organizational Readiness
Organizational processes will require changes to ensure the process flows into and out of the PMO are integrated into the organization.
2.    Cultural Readiness
The organization has to assess its readiness based on current resource pools, whether the resources can be migrated to PMO teams, and how other members of community will be able to align with PMO requirements based on their knowledge, experience, skills and mindset.
3.    Strategic Alignment
The goal is not just to have another department, but to have a team of people agile enough to act quickly and in a focused manner. And planning of the PMO has to include reasons that align with direct impacts on strategic goals of the organization.

As director of the enterprise program management office at General Motors (GM), Paul Checkowsky oversees program management offices around the world in different functionary areas like sales, manufacturing and supply chain. He took some time to answer a couple of questions about the state of the project management office (PMO) at the auto giant and throughout the world.

How has the economic downturn affected the PMO at GM?
From an economic standpoint, we've got to be a lot more careful about getting the most value for our money. A couple of examples:
   In the past, we've focused a lot on quality assurance of the process--making sure that people are following all of the steps. That's very time-consuming and can be expensive. Now we've built the quality-assurance process into the steps. We no longer have checkers checking peoples' work. We basically built the quality into the process, so that at the end, we don't need to perform a final quality review.
   We are also doing more backward planning rather than forward planning. We are making timing and content commitments to our business community at the beginning of the year and we are holding the project teams to those commitments. We then plan backward to determine what and when we have to do to achieve the commitments. Many project teams are not comfortable with this approach but it does force teams to get off to a fast start and forces them to resolve issues in a timely and efficient manner.   
   The other thing we've been doing is instead of being a policing organization, [the PMO] is now much more involved with mentoring upfront-- making sure the project teams are aware of the processes and helping them know where they might encounter bumps in the road.

Do you think more organizations are realizing the value of the PMO?
They are.
   Actually, in the last six to 12 months, I've [received] a lot of feedback from individuals saying that this new approach--where the PMOs are actually part of the teams doing the work--is very effective.
   [Organizations] themselves are finding ways to leverage these PMO capabilities and this expertise especially helping to identify and resolve integration issues, mentoring of enabling processes and eliminating deployment roadblocks. So I think it's been very positive, and I think it's here to stay.

   Mr. Checkowsky says it's hard to say what is going to happen with GM's EPMO in light of the economic situation. At the time of this interview, news headlines speculated the organization's possible bankruptcy.
   Overall, however, he says that "people are going to expect more with less. That's not going to change. We're going to have to do a lot more with fewer people, less money and less time."
    Despite the challenges, however, he says there are exciting opportunities out there. "Because of the conditions that we're facing, this is really an opportunity for us to put some changes in place that we've considered in the past.
   "Before, there wasn't a burning platform. Now, there is. So people are much more open to changes and new ideas--where in the past, they'd be, "This has worked for us all of these years. Why change?" Now people are realizing they do need to change. It's actually an opportunity to put some of these new approaches in place. We've just got to make sure that they're effective."

Editor's Note: For more information on how project management offices are changing the way the work to the benefit of organizations in today's economy, check out PMI.org/features.
 
 

Of the three components of a project's baseline, scope has to be the weakest. Why? Cost baselines are captured in amounts of currency or resources that can be quantified with a high level of exactitude. Ditto with the schedule baseline, since the units we use to measure time haven't changed for centuries--the sole exception being the French Revolution, a period of time not exactly known for the advancement of managerial concepts.
    But scope is different: it is captured using words, and words are difficult, magical things. Yes, they have their precise side, their denotations, but they also have their uncontrollable side, their connotations.
    For example, "pathetic," denotatively, simply refers to an emotionally based argument. But its connotation has become so powerfully associated with "pitiful" that it's impossible to use the word and assume your listeners will only take in its denotative meaning. If you also note that the words "pompous" and "awful" were considered high praise just one century ago, it becomes easy to see why any inclusion of "quality," "seamless," "integrated," or "effective" can quickly lead any declaration of scope into the hinterland of near meaninglessness.
     If your organization has a mission statement, take it off your bookshelf, blow the dust off and read it with this question in mind: How many ways could those words be interpreted to a successful end? I'd bet, with the mushiness intrinsic to so many such statements, the number would be near infinite. Small wonder why so many projects are utterly undone by scope creep. If you don't know precisely where you're going, they it's easy to take a slightly more difficult path, a little more difficult, a little more ... and then you find yourself in the land of impossibility.
    What's the solution? Hire more English majors in your project office. Not the wimpy, overly opinionated snobs from obscure private colleges. No, I'm talking about state university-graduated, massive American-car driving, engineering-as-a-dual-major writers. Now, that's the type of person who can nail down a scope statement, with only the willfully opaque being unable to clearly understand it.

All successful project management offices (PMOs) have one thing in common, while all failed PMOs lack this same thing. Indeed, if your PMO has this one thing it's next to impossible for it to fail; similarly, if your PMO lacks this, you will not succeed, not matter how much more, time and energy you invest. So, what is this "brass ring" of PMOs?
    Cooperation.
It's funny, too, because of the wildly divergent theories out there about how project management ought to be performed and advanced, and what manifestations of the organization are indicative of success or failure. Some believe that only cost and schedule baselines contained in one software represent a successful PMO, while others hold a rival software combination as the only acceptable setup.
    Many auditors will express outrage at the lack of internal procedures and guides, still others want widespread professional certifications. Many managers who, at some time, had been associated with what they perceived to be a successful PMO will have misidentified the primary casual factor that led to that success. As I discuss in my new book, Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong, the idea that organizational clout can be leveraged to compel successful project management advancement is a myth, whether that clout-leveraging takes the form of forcing the tool (mandating the use of a certain software), issuing procedures and guides, or any of the other so-called coercive strategies.
    The only way your PMO will succeed is if you adopt a technical approach to advancing project management capabilities that centers on obtaining that brass ring--cooperation--from the other parts of the macro-organization. And that level of cooperation can be elusive, indeed, but consider what you, the PMO director, are asking: You essentially want everybody else to change the way they've been doing business, for decades in some cases. I would submit that asking anybody to change anything they've been doing a certain way for years, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the new way is better for everyone involved, is difficult in the extreme.
    Difficult, but not impossible.
    How is it done? To find out, you can pose a question on the blog that leads me to tip my hand and disclose the optimal technical approach. But there are two problems with that:
1. You still won't know my take on things that can blow up your implementation, even with the optimal technical approach
2. I'm expecting people to try to get me to reveal this secret, so I'm on to you.

Editor's note: You can purchase Michael Hatfield's new book, Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong, in the PMI Marketplace. During the month of October it is available at a discounted rate.