Project Management Office (PMO) fundamentals Part V

– – IDENTITY- Strategy & Structure: stakeholders need to know what the purpose of the PMO is, its value proposition, how it will impact current and future capabilities, and what products and services it will offer. This is the foundation of the PMO and failure to build a strong foundation can be catastrophic; as Gilbraith states “misalignment of strategy [and] structure, and processes will cause activities to conflict, units of work at cross-purposes, and organizational energy to dissipate over many frictions;” the PMO must be reconfigurable with “a series of short-term advantages” that quickly demonstrate business value and build credibility and sustainability (Designing Organizations, 2002, p.75). We begin with the PMO mission: a sample mission statement.

MISSION:
To improve capability in the delivery of products and services by reinforcing core competency with both assurance and governance in project management practices and principles.

Here Assurance means building confidence, building competence, capability and Governance instills sound management upon the expectations and performance in delivery. Certainly a PMO could have a mission that focuses on finance, continuous improvement, Six Sigma—this is a generic mission for this blogs illustration.

GOALS:
Effectiveness: The PMO will build and leverage customer capital, customer/market measures, ensuring an understanding of customer’s needs and wants, building those products and services, and ensuring satisfaction that builds loyalty and high retention.

Efficiency: The PMO will build and leverage process capital, process measures, in organizational efficiency and improvements understanding its capability internally and in the industry.

Evolvement: The PMO will build and leverage innovation capital, preparing for the future, in its strategic planning, alliances and partnerships, change management and investments with foresight into the future.

Expertise: The PMO will build and leverage human capital, people development, in personnel development, leadership, readiness in understanding current capability and capacity and future state to drive organizational success.

Execution: The PMO will build and leverage financial capital, financial measures, in driving business value, profitability, return on investment, to drive organizational success.

– – Our goals provide a high level understanding of what we wish to accomplish, our objectives must be more specific, i.e. according to Pearce & Robinson, they must “clearly and concisely state what will be achieved and when it will be achieved. Thus, objectives should be measureable over time” (Strategic Management, 2007, p. 193). On technique used to delineate objects is called SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Achievable, Realistic and Timebound. In this blog I will not go delineating objectives as it would directly relate to the PMO products and services. With goals and objectives written with alignment to strategic initiatives and metrics considered, we can think of measuring the current organizational capability.

– – Two industry services in measuring organizational capability have been available for several years now proving their test of time: here are two.

MEASURING PROJECT MANAGEMENT CAPABILITY
Kerzner Project Management Maturity Model Online Assessment

PMI's Organizational Project Management Maturity Model - OPM3

Both models provide a diagnostic tool that provides an understanding of current capability and with consulting, to understand your organizations desired future state, a structured development plan can be created to determine both cost, schedule, resources and risk in implementation. I am pleased to state that I wrote the forward for Dr. Kerzner’s 2nd edition to his companion text as well as implemented his approach at Microsoft Services. One additional mention is Carnegie Mellon’s People Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI): another innovation with emphasis in software systems and processes. Know we have the ability to understand what the PMO will be dealing with, the advantages of leading indicators and opportunities for growth on the lagging.

– – The last area within Identity is stating the products and services the PMO will offer and when they will be available. With our goals in mind, our products and services have a focus on: outcome; productivity; growth; people; and valuation in terms of the customer and the organization. Each of these categories, as a product aligns to the Dynamic Multi-Dimensional Performance (DMP) framework for organizational performance (a derivative of the balanced scorecard). Moreover, each also aligns to Edvinsson & Malones extensive research on intellectual capital at Skandia which published its first IC Annual Report in 1995; and Shenhar & Dvir’s extensive research in reinventing project management with their diamond approach to successful growth and innovation. It is important to note that I have created a menu approach for the senior management level that combines this research with additional references creating a simple pick-list that should satisify many C-Level executives in meeting their enterprise PMO needs (too detailed for this blog, but will be introduced subsequently). Here are a sample of three:

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
1) Project Management Methodology: establish, implement, and manage maturity of practices and methodology; develop and manage life cycle solutions.
2) Project Management Tools: evaluate, select, implement projecttools and job aides.
3) Standards and Metrics: Implement standards; determine project metrics requirements; introduce and use metrics

– – This completes our discussion on Identity-Strategy & Structure and in Part VI I will focus on Relationships-People.