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PMO Community Involvement -- The PMO SIG and Related Research

It's a short holiday week here in the US, so I will do my part to put this entry on a preemptive diet in anticipation of pecan pie, cranberry sauce and stuffing a few days from now. With the concept of Thanksgiving comes the realization that the PMO community is a vibrant one, well blessed in terms of support and resources. Here are but a few examples.

I reported on the energy surrounding the First Annual PMO SIG Symposium in my November 12th entry, and plans are rapidly moving forward for 2009. The 2nd symposium has already been announced for Atlanta on November 8-10th, so please be sure to mark your calendars. We had one of our best-ever PMO 2.0 Forums there on Peachtree Street in 2007, so I know the local PMO community will be great hosts to the rest of us.

Most of you are PMI members and many belong to the PMO SIG as well, but for those that aren't yet members, I would suggest that you consider getting involved in that community as a means to both help others as well as take advantage of the resources it offers. I am very impressed with the leadership and direction of the group and excited about the forward looking approach they are taking. Visit the PMI PMO Specific Interest Group for more information.

If course there are other public PMO forums as well, and I will be speaking at the IQPC PMO Summit in a few weeks, along with good friends Terry McArdle and Mark Perry. Speaking of Mark, there is always his PMO Podcast to draw upon, which can also be easily found on iTunes for download and listening during your commute or whenever you get a moment.

Another important aspect of the PMO global community includes those individuals that work hard on research of benefit to all of us. I had the pleasure meeting Brian Hobbs and Monique Aubry of the University of Quebec in Montreal while in San Antonio, and their notable ongoing PMO research is a great example of what I mean by that. If as individual PMO managers it sometimes seems a bit like being an explorer in the wilderness, consider Dr. Hobbs and Dr. Aubry as your cartographers. Their work helps to map the shifting PMO landscape so you can go forward with a modicum of confidence. As part of their efforts, they need the help of those of you out on the frontier to report back what is going on. If you would like to be involved in that effort and reap the benefit of their research results, please support their current survey on PMO Transition. Note that this study is being conducted in conjunction with the Business School of Umea University, Sweden.

I could go on, as the list is long, but I promised to be brief. The important thing is to realize that you aren't alone, and that together we all lift each other up, so become an active member of the community and take advantage of everything it has to offer.

Economic Contraction and Managing a Portfolio of Inverted Opportunity

Well, we just closed under 8000 on the Dow. Most of us have all been through this in one form or another over the years — retrenchment. As the tide of recession begins to rise, the lucky ones find themselves breathing through a reed, while those already under water hold their breath and thrash about for something to latch on to. All indicators point to this economic downturn as a long slide, with prospects for a shallow overwash and speedy recovery dwindling. It is during such times that a cool head and thoughtful decisions determine who are the winners and losers emerging on the other side.

On the front end, the immediate impacts seem spotty and sometimes hard to explain. Like a tornado skipping through a community, some organizations in the path appear spared while others catch a direct hit. For example, I visited a customer earlier this week, a conservatively run regional bank in the Midwest, that is doing OK. Meanwhile, some of the larger financial services organizations are in the news because of massive staff reductions.

Eventually, everyone is affected; it is just a matter of when and to what degree. Even if you are missed initially, finding yourself as a neighbor to a pile of splinters makes it increasingly difficult to maintain an upbeat long term perspective amid the wreckage.

Then one day a dump truck and end loader shows up, scooping away the remnants. The builders soon follow; a new house slowly fills the vacant lot, stronger than its predecessor. It's ultimately a positive cycle, even though it may not appear that way right now.

How an organization manages itself during a period of challenge is more important than the decisions it makes in times of plenty. Allow me…

In a strong economy, decisions tend to center around how to best leverage discretionary funds for growth and expansion; like a child with a quarter at the candy counter, choices are made from a selection of mostly tasty options (I do not like licorice — red, black or otherwise). However, when faced with the need to make hard decisions to counter a bad market, the choices become decidedly less inviting, but infinitely more important. It's like the difference between electing to get a nose job versus repairing an aneurism — both require skilled surgeons, but the circumstances and implications aren't even comparable. That's not to say you can't die from a poorly executed cosmetic procedure, but even the best heart surgery can turn ugly in an instant. I've seen it happen countless times on TV.

As a PMO, now is the time to perform at the top of your game. Help the executive team be rigorous and make good thoughtful decisions. The patient is counting on you to pull them through this rough patch; we'll worry about the facelift later.

2008 PMI PMO Symposium -- Creative Destruction and the PMO

I'm just back from the first annual PMI PMO Symposium in San Antonio, engineered by the PMO Special Interest Group (SIG). We were a proud sponsor of this inaugural summit and it was well attended by almost 300 PMO professionals and stakeholders. It was an excellent event, and kudos go out to the countless PMI and SIG officers, members and volunteers that made it happen. If you didn't make it this year, you need to put this on your 2009 Must-Do list. I think you would be hard pressed to find a higher concentration or wider range of PMO expertise and discourse at another single event.

While this symposium was great, I am even more jazzed about the immense potential it holds for the future. Erica and I had a great discussion over dinner on Sunday with Art Drake, the SIG Executive Chair, and Jim Carras, the SIG Director of Knowledge Management, about the needs of the members and PMO community in general.

With three session tracks and helping attend to the booth, I didn't get to sit in on every presentation I wanted to, but I definitely came away with a lot of food for thought and some specific impressions about the overall state of PMOs. There is no way to relate everything swirling around in my head about the symposium to you in this post; it gave me enough fodder to fill entries for the next quarter. However, there is one topic that I want to lead off with, and relate it to a particular concept that I've been thinking about lately that I would like to offer up as an explanation of what I think I heard.

From the discussions on Sunday afternoon to the break out sessions on Tuesday, there were a handful of recurring themes that stood out. Among them is the lack of consensus on what a PMO is or what it does in definitive terms, which is evident by the divided nature of those who think of a PMO as an organization that furthers the discipline of project management versus those of who think of it as a vehicle for business management integration and/or transformation. Another one was the seemingly temporary nature of the PMO in many organizations — allow me to elaborate on what I mean by that and offer some basis for the condition.

The Keynote session on Monday was a topic dear to my heart as of recent times. Drs. Brian Hobbs and Monique Aubry, both Ph.Ds and professors at the University of Quebec in Montreal, presented some of their extensive PMO research findings in "Knowledge of PMOs Grounded in Reality." Among many great data points and observations that Dr. Hobbs presented was the idea that the majority of both parent organizations and the PMOs that support them are in a state of change.  Dr. Aubry went on to explain that PMO change as a cyclic event, with each iteration comprised of events, structuring and consequences; a cause-and-effect lifecycle consisting of organizational context, PMO structure and its performance relative to the needs of the organization. The topic came up again in more general terms as part of the panel discussion at the end of the day.

Flash forward to Tuesday morning, with the esteemed Hugh Woodward offering the second keynote, "Confronting the PMO's Critical Marketing Challenges." Among the many salient points he offered was an observation regarding the relatively young average age of most PMOs (54% less than 2 years old, referencing the Hobbs and Aubry findings). He posed the rhetorical question about whether there was a dramatic upsurge in new PMOs, or whether organizations that had PMOs in the past were constantly shutting down and then rebuilding them. He offered that the PMO has a different purpose than a project manager and must be focused on business outcomes, not triple constraints. I won't go further into his conclusions here, but you get the idea. There were several other examples of the PMO reincarnation phenomenon in break out presentations. The last session I sat in on was a chronicle of Kelly Russell's three-year PMO journey at Pinnacol Assurance, from being a mere twinkle in her eye to where it is today, with a description of how its mission and structure transformed along the way.

Now, let me relate these examples to a concept that our founder, Pat Durbin, introduced in his keynote address at our North American user conference just a few weeks ago. In that presentation, he spoke of Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter, who described the principle of "creative destruction" in 1942. Schumpeter employed this term to describe a process in which the old ways of doing things are continuously destroyed and replaced by new ways, as a means of explaining a constant state of change driven by the capitalist market compared to a relatively static socialist environment. With everything going on these days, the concept seems more relevant now than ever. For instance, the US auto industry, real estate market and financial services sector all represent classic cases of creative destruction.

One of the early lessons I learned as a PMO manager was the need to be keenly attuned to the shifts in the direction of our constituents, or risk quickly becoming irrelevant. As a service provider, the PMO must constantly reevaluate what it is offering versus the changing needs and perceptions of the organization — Kelly's presentation and PMO is a perfect real-world example of this.

I would like to suggest that the concept of creative destruction effectively illustrates the circumstances that the PMO faces. The world around it is constantly discarding old ways for those that are perceived to be better, smarter, faster, more flexible or cost effective. Thus the PMO itself must be in a state of continual assessment and evolution or risk being creatively destroyed when its current state is perceived as no longer useful or even a hindrance. But as the research shows, even in failure the basic premise of the PMO often re-emerges in a new and different form like a phoenix rising from the ashes, because in the final analysis it is a necessary and worthwhile arrow in the quiver of management techniques — welcome to PMO 2.0.

Controlling Operational Challenges -- PMO 2.0 Survey Results Teaser

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The analytical dust has settled, and I am putting the finishing touches on the conclusions and recommendations for the 2008 PMO 2.0 Survey Report this week. Meanwhile, we are finalizing the schedule for disseminating the information out to all that are interested.

Dare I say, some of the key findings are just going to rock your world.

For everyone that participated in the survey, you can expect to get your copy first, delivered to the email account you provided. This should happen a day or two prior to a web cast we will hold to go over the results. Expect all this to go down around the first week of December.

Why so long? Well, just because I am finished with drafting the report doesn't mean it is ready to go out the door. I need to do an internal briefing on the results, it has to be professionally edited and formatted, blah, blah, blah. Plus, we really think it will be more meaningful to offer the findings up via a web cast; setting it up, getting it publicized and allowing you time to register quickly eats up the calendar.

Allow me to whet your whistle just a bit in the mean time. Among some of the more significant findings is the relationship between operational challenges and their impact compared to other factors. For those who took the survey, you may recall there were 33 common challenges listed, divided into four categories; organizational, process, technological and situational. We asked respondents to identify the impact of each of those challenges, with options ranging from Critical Problem to Significant Challenge, Minor Issue, Not a Problem or Not Applicable. I converted responses into scores, and twisted that numerical data every which way I could, comparing it with several other responses to understand relationships. Let me show you something:

Each vertical column represents 1 of the 33 challenges, while each pair of horizontal rows represent the average impact, and the prevalence of issues marked as 'critical' or 'significant.' Obviously there are scores corresponding to the dashboard colors; those as well as the challenge and attribute titles are omitted for the purpose of tickling your curiosity.

Even with all the details absent, what is glaringly apparent is that a "certain particular attribute" has a HUGE effect — across the board — on whether organizations are being controlled by the host of more insidious challenges, or whether they are able to successfully mitigate their effects.

(To further titillate your intellectual desires, I will tell you that there are actually not one but two related characteristics that yield very similar results when correlated to operational challenges, resulting in a steamy performance management ménage a trois.)

I have to admit to you, when I first uncovered this finding, I was initially swept with a profound sense of sadness. The responses that constitute the first few rows represent real organizations with real people, and there is obviously a high potential for real frustration under such circumstances. Look at how many of these challenges consistently come in as red or yellow, and let me tell you, that is not a good thing. It means that most of the time the issue is CRITICAL or SIGNIFICANT for most of those that fall into that group. Over half of the challenges listed collectively conspire to torment well over a hundred different organizations every day, impacting their performance and generating misery.

The white boxes are neutral, meaning the average impact falls somewhere between 'significant' and 'minor', or that the rate of significant occurrence is less common. Green is good of course; the average impact is 'minor' or less, and the frequency of these issues being identified as significant is under 40%. So, what is so different between the organizations that have to endure the active lava flows littering the operational landscape in the top half of the rows, versus those living in the cool green valley of the lower half? Well, that's the good news — getting control of challenges is readily achievable by any organization that wants to. Just realizing that the whole situation is correctable pulled me out of my funk and I quickly recouped my customary jovial composure. The answers to this little riddle are in the report, along with a host of other actionable insights.

Of course, you know that this blog is ground zero for staying informed about things like the date and registration details for the web cast, or how to download a copy of the report, or any scheduled public presentations on the survey — did I mention that you could sign up to get an email alert when important information like that is posted? Thought so.