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Clearing the Baffles: A PMO Update

Any past steely-eyed killers of the deep (or those who studied "The Hunt for Red October" waaay too closely) will recognize this term as a submarine maneuver term for making a rapid temporary deviation in course. This is done to check that nothing is behind you that you couldn't hear, because the noise from your own prop creates a blind spot directly aft on sonar. When the Soviets did it, it was referred to as a "Crazy Ivan" because of the notoriously abrupt and deadly nature of their undersea U-turn. Now that the Iranians have announced they are building their own class of subs, I suppose the term will morph into an "Angry Ayatollah" or something.

Anyway, the point of the title is that this entry is to clear out some contacts that have been trailing in my wake lately, so pardon the lack of cohesive thought that is about to spill forth.

PMO 2.0 Whitepaper

The reason for my sparse postings is that we have been studiously working on consolidating the current 4-part PMO 2.0 whitepaper series into a single concise body of work. Collapsing 40+ pages written over a two-year span into a document less than half that size, while at the same time not losing the essence of the concept and updating the content may well be the thing that finally gets me a sparsely decorated padded room. Anyway, we should have it on the street in the coming weeks.

Real ITSM

Rob England, the IT Skeptic (see my blog roll to your right), sent me a copy of his very hilarious and quite skeptical book, "Introduction to Real ITSM." It is a brilliant parody that exposes how convoluted service management methodologies and their related organizations have become. Enter the enchanted world of deathcycles, "wetware" (that would be you), and the Wright Cycle (guess-do-crash-fix). Even the footnotes are funny. However, much like dirty jokes written by contractors on the wall just before they are covered up by cabinets, there is some cryptic graffiti underneath the scarred and stained veneer of this book that offers some pragmatic wisdom if you think hard enough about it. I strongly advise against that though — just enjoy it, even if now and then you feel a bit of a sting. You will come out the other side a more grounded practitioner.

Stage Gate Certification

Did you notice the addition of the Stage Gate Ready symbol proudly displayed on our home page? As part of our official entry into Product Portfolio Management, Carrie Nauyalis, our PdPM and PPM Product Manager, along with Jason White, our Vice President of North American Solution Consulting, spent some intense days at Stage-Gate walking through and demonstrating how our capabilities satisfied their very detailed and long list of certification requirements. More info on what we are doing in the Product Portfolio Management area another time.

GITMO

As I write this, I'm sure the Marine Commandant at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is breathing a sigh of relief, as Tropical Storm Gustav, which had been making a bee-line track straight for them, turned abruptly south. I distinctly remember spending Thanksgiving 1976 at the NCO club there, drinking Tequila Sunrises and looking out over the mine field. OK, I know that this is getting pretty far afield, but for some reason I have been thinking about what a mess those guys would have had from a direct hit, and I am hoping that by writing about it, I will exorcise the thought (I am after all, clearing baffles). By the way, Jack was right; you want him on that wall and you really can't handle the truth.

Coming Events

Can you believe August is over and the kids are back in school? HEY! That means the New Jersey PMO 2.0 Leadership Forum is next week! If you are in the NYC area, and want to attend, now would be the time to register.

Following closely is our Planview Horizons North American User Conference the first week of October. If you are a customer, you really do not want to miss this year — lots of great presentations and events lined up. I know we say that about all of these, but really, this one is going to be greater than our usual great.

A month later is the PMI PMO Symposium in San Antonio hosted by our PMO SIG; we are a sponsor and I am planning on attending. Stop and say hello if you come down for this.

Follow Up — CPDE Course

I had a good discussion Monday with Donna Knapp at the ITSM Academy about the Certified Process Design Engineer class (see my post dated 8/19/08; No I'm not putting in a bunch of links, it's all right down below this one — use the scroll wheel, for goodness sake, you need the exercise). I think this course is going to continue to evolve into a pretty neat offering that has a lot more balance and wider appeal than originally planned; reserve a seat now.

Forrester: The Building Blocks of an Effective PMO

Lewis Cardin has a new 8-page report out (The Building Blocks of an Effective PMO, #45217, dated 8 August 2008) that you might find of interest. It discusses some survey results and runs down PMO general considerations for ensuring they add recognized value. The study breaks the PMO into three functional elements: project office, portfolio/program management office and the PMO as a center of excellence/internal consultancy. I would call this PMO 1.5.

Why not 2.0? It's all good except for continuing to consider only project work/innovation as being within the scope of the PMO. I stubbornly maintain that the IT PMO must have a handle on all IT demand and capacity elements (total work and resource management) if it is to ever achieve effective project management in a matrix, multi-tasking, operate + innovate environment. Not to mention smoothly integrating service and project management disciplines so they play nicely together.

"Mister Gorbachev, Tear Down That Wall!"

It ain't gonna happen on its own folks, so why not leverage the PMO as a centralized point for IT business management across the entire product and service lifecycle? I know, I know, it is the same sad old song from me, but if you just hum a few bars, you will find it to be a catchy tune.

OK, I feel better now. A couple of stats contained in the report are worth ruminating on.

First is that only about half of the organizations (of 233 decision makers surveyed in North America and Europe) even had a PMO. What's up with that?! You would think that by now organizations of any size and significance would have gotten the memo. So, I'm sitting here thinking about why that is, and this is what I came up with off the cuff for hurdles that are preventing a PMO from clearing the fence:

• Too small; you have to get enough staff critical mass (i.e., sufficient confusion) to warrant a PMO. If I had to pin an unqualified number on what that size is, I would say somewhere between 150-to-300 people. Your mileage may vary. If you have over 400 IT staff and don't have a head on the monster, you are way too big to be acting like that.
• Too immature; the organization cannot spell 'process' or 'accountability', and likes it that way.
• Too volatile; operating in a totally ad hoc environment where planning is futile. Bummer.
• Too reactive; the current crisis management routine and alligator wrestling means you can't free up any staff long enough to figure out how to drain the swamp.
• Phobic; strong silos where department heads fear a PMO will threaten their power and autonomy, expose structural weaknesses, or in situations where a PMO has been tried before and failed.
• Anemic; IT leadership is too unwilling/lazy to effect positive change — because after all, change is such a hassle.
• In denial; the organization fails to recognize the benefit or necessity of a PMO because it cannot objectively assess its own situation, and/or the drivers that would trigger a PMO have emerged so gradually that "the frog is now in a pot that is boiling."

The second stat is around PMO effectiveness. This is a bit of a glass half-full versus half-empty situation. The opening paragraph in the report paints the state of the PMO a tad gloomy, so I found it interesting that 93% of respondents with a PMO indicated that theirs was providing perceived benefit (35% at "very effective" and 58% "somewhat effective"), which quite frankly is higher than I would have supposed or recall seeing in past analysis.

Bear in mind perceived PMO effectiveness can be significantly impacted by organizational and environmental factors outside of its span of control. For example, the PMO doing a very good job at providing decision support information may have its image tarnished if that information is not being effectively applied.

Taken in context with the flip side (having only 6% being categorized as somewhat ineffective and only 1% as very ineffective), these are not necessarily a bad set of stats in my book. Don't get me wrong, I would prefer to see those 35/58 numbers reversed, but over a third of PMOs being perceived as rocking and rolling is pretty good, especially if most of the other 58% are also trending in a positive direction (this supposition is not in the report; I'm just saying…).

OK, enuff said — for the 53% of you looking for ammo to get a PMO established, or those who are trying to extend the services of your "somewhat (in)effective" existing PMO, this would be a good report to help load up the business case gun. These numbers basically shout out, "Hey look boss, the odds are strongly in our favor that this whole PMO thing is probably going to be worth more benefit than the trouble it causes."

Going for Process Gold -- The ITSM Academy CPDE Course

Did ya miss me? Sorry for going a bit silent. I spent all last week in Ft. Lauderdale attending the pre-public version of the Certified Process Design Engineer™ (CPDE) Course offered by the ITSM Academy, preceded by a quick weekend sanity break in Key West at a REAL Lobster Fest. As I write this, the eye of Tropical Storm Faye is visiting the Keys; I figure between all the beer, crustacean drool, sweat and drawn butter spilled on Duval Street while I was there, the place was due for a good scrubbing anyway. Please — just don't hurt the Green Parrot; it's over a hundred years old and I would really miss the joint.

But I digress…

While the focus of the CPDE course is definitely directed towards service management processes, at least 80% of its contents are broadly applicable to pretty much any kind of business process — there's more on that later, so read on.

Successful course completion and passing the exam gains you CPDE certification accredited through Loyalist Certification Services. Note that Loyalist is based out of Canada. The graphic is the CPDE certification pin. While the folks at the ITSM Academy claim mere coincidence, it still gives me an urge to douse myself in maple syrup, speak French and play hockey, eh?

This class constantly reminded me that there are a lot of moving parts to process improvement that architects sometimes take for granted or lose sight of. It is one thing to informally collect tools and techniques over the course of one's career, and quite another to package them all up and deliver (or consume!) them in a five-day period. I have been exposed to, and forgotten, most of the elements covered in this class to some degree over the years, so it was a great opportunity to get reacquainted with all of that content. Perhaps most importantly, I can't really think of anything of significance missing from the course that I would want or expect to see in such an offering. But, to whom to we owe such a compliment?

The CPDE course was developed by Donna Knapp, who leads curriculum development for ITSM Academy. Donna, an experienced practitioner and noted author of several books related to service desk management, also presided over the shake-down cruise of this course to some internal trainers and staff and a few invited outsiders. Some of you may recall that I reviewed the ITSM Academy offering for ITIL V.3 Foundation training that I attended and remarked on the quality of instruction that Joy Yoder delivered. I have to say that Joy wasn't a fluke; Donna, and everyone I have come in contact with thus far at 'the academy' has impressed me with their attitudes, knowledge levels, experience and professionalism, so a big tip of the hat goes to co-founders Jayne Groll and Lisa Schwartz and the rest of the team there for what they have assembled. By the way, both Jayne and Lisa attended the class, so they are fully invested in walking their talk.

OK, so more about the class. The goals as stated in the course manual pretty much sum it up, including utilizing frameworks and standards for process design guidance, determining customer requirements, evaluating the maturity of existing processes, exposing some proven best practices and tools for process improvement (TQM, Six Sigma, Lean, the 7 Tools of Quality, etc.), overcoming resistance to organizational change, and brief review of considerations for selecting technology related to process automation (which I had some thoughts on, as you might imagine). It is a lot of material to cover in a week.

It should not be a surprise that the frameworks and standards discussed concentrate on methodologies such as ITIL, CobiT, MOF and the ISO standard 20000 and 9000 series. Donna employs the ISO 20000 Process Model as a basis for the scope of the class, but also draws upon the ITIL Maturity Framework and an iterative 10-step process design and improvement model that I affectionately dubbed the "Ferris Wheel". You must be at least 60" tall to ride this puppy.

I have designed and managed enough processes to choke a pig over the past 25 years, but I am not, nor have I ever been a service manager, so I entered this course feeling a little bit hobbled. Fortunately, between my ITIL foundation and the fact that I had recently spent some time looking over both MOF and CobiT for an unrelated reason, those parts were not an issue. But the ISO standards were foreign to me, so getting some perspective on those was useful.

What becomes more problematic for those that are not immersed in the ITSM world on a day-to-day basis is the certification test. Eighty percent of the exam points are concentrated around 16 scenario-based questions. They require the student to apply their knowledge to troubleshoot and select the "most proper" approaches to solving real-world service management process issues, often given some "less proper" options to choose from. That is a good thing, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that both the practice exam and the final test we took were bears. I think most everyone in the class struggled with them to some degree (and remember these folks are all seasoned). Fortunately, representatives from Loyalist were there to debrief and gather our 'enthusiastic' feedback on the inaugural exam, so hopefully the future test bank will be a little more concise. But hey, that's why you do these initial sessions, right?

(Dying to know aren't you? Yes, I passed…and we'll just leave it at that.)

Bottom line — although the course was designed and intended for those who must architect and manage service management processes, I would recommend that anyone actively involved in developing and improving general IT processes consider this course as a way of quickly building a toolbox of skills and techniques to apply. That's not to infer that a process novice will pop out the other side of the week as an expert; this is probably not a class for novices. But if you are already involved in process improvement and do not have formal basis for your work or a cohesive, structured approach to apply, this class is just the ticket. For those of you who subscribe to PMO 2.0 concepts and thus need greater exposure to the service side of the business, this course will not only make you a better process architect, but has the added bonus of broadening your IT business management horizons beyond projects. Just plan on spending about two hours a night studying and eat your Wheaties on Friday morning!

Technology Addicted? Try Soft Skills Rehab

"I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man…"

As I prepare to write this, vaguely cognizant that this is a corporate blog for a software company, I am reminded of the above line from Robert Duvall in True Grit (1969) — just take this post as proof that we believe that technology is only part of the solution.

People, Process, Tools — let's talk, People.

(By the way, for all you out there that didn't catch this movie before it left the theaters — the aforementioned quote is not a really a line you want to toss out at John Wayne when he has a double barrel shotgun across his saddle; put this one on your must-watch list of Academy Award winners.)

In my last entry, the idea of "influencing without authority" was mentioned as one of the key capabilities that the PMO must have. A few days later, I'm trading emails with long-time colleague Patrick Boylan, the President and CEO at Intellilink; he was sharing how excited they were about their new offering, PeoplePM. It is a soft-skills development workshop for project managers, and response has been beyond their expectations. PeoplePM focuses on six critical PM attributes: Anticipation, Organization, Leadership, Communication, Pragmatism, and Empathy. Among the many fashion accessories a project manager must don, consider this to be the all-important mood ring. (But then, if you haven't seen True Grit, you probably aren't old enough to appreciate that line either.)

I'm not at all surprised that there is a big need out there for such support, but I am pleasantly surprised that the need is also perhaps finally — finally — maturing into a big market. To get from need to market, the need must first be recognized, and then be considered important enough to actually do something about it. The distance between those two points can make for a huge leap.

How huge?

Step One of Twelve: admit you have a problem and are powerless to fix it on your own.

So-far-gone-I-am-finally-dragging-myself-to-a-meeting huge.

Have things gotten into such a stupor on the humanistic side that technology drunkards are coming in off the street to sober up? Within Intellilink's explanation of their offering is this: "We decided to identify what really makes project managers successful."…" What we found was that it didn't matter if you had a sophisticated project management software system, or were utilizing the latest project management methodology . . . they don't hurt, it's just that something else was more important."

More important? How about as important?!

As I noted to Patrick, even though interpersonal and leadership skills are certainly appreciated, making the leap to actually invest in building them is perhaps one of the most under-served subject areas in the corporate training landscape. Yet, these are among most important skill sets to have in collaborative knowledge worker environments (hmmm, ya' think?). Maybe their response rate to PeoplePM signals a turn in the tide. One can only hope.

Looking over the role of the project manager and that of the PMO, both must certainly be adept at influencing others and plying the attributes listed above, except that, interestingly enough, oftentimes the project manager has more recognized authority than the PMO does! Assignment to a project team has a more tangible stickiness to it than being a member of 'the management team;' too many managers simply opt out of being active members of that club.

At the PMO forums, leadership, culture, and accountability always come up in our discussions, and they undoubtedly will still be hot topics at PMO forums on Mars a hundred years from now. Every generation must re-learn this as a foreign language subject, as it is not a native skill. So, I will end this with the same suggestion that I did in my 3-entry series on accountability from last August: it's perfectly OK for the PMO to take the initiative on setting up leadership training. I figure that if you weren't ready to act on that a year ago, maybe by now the need is more clearly recognized — to the point that its time to do something about it. By the way, sit in on the classes: the PMO staff needs the skills as much as the PMs!

Alert! Alert! Upcoming New Jersey PMO 2.0 Leadership Forum

Registration for the PMO 2.0 Leadership Forum is up for everyone in the NYC area that would like to attend our 11th PMO 2.0 Leadership Forum on September 4th at the Hyatt Regency in Jersey City. Terry McArdle, a longtime friend, associate, and the current Vice President of the Project Management Office at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (JRI — America) will be making the quick trip over from Manhattan to share their PMO story with attendees. We are also lining up a great expert panel team, including Michael Leser of ESPN and Fumi Kondo of Intellilink — we are working on one other player to be named before the playoff season begins to round out this roster of heavy hitters.

For those of you that just showed up at the party and have no earthly idea of what I am talking about, glance over to your left; see that Category Link "Industry and Events?" Click on that and scroll down through the entries and you will see several posts and pictures from previous forums. Either that, or what the heck — surprises are fun! Fun surprises are even funner! Just register and drop on in.

Speaking of fun, we're expecting quite a few to come over from that island across the river. I have an idea — get a half-dozen black limos and town cars reserved and stick a couple of obscure flags on the lead vehicle; then you all can come hauling over the bridge en masse, like the President or The Stones or Trump, or some UN contingent. Terry M, can you help coordinate? Listen, if you all decide to do it let me know; that'll be a hoot to watch from Jersey City and I want to get pictures. Have 'em blinking the headlights as you come rolling up; that'll be cool.