Linking PMO to the Strategic Plan
This week I attended a PMI chapter meeting/luncheon here in Austin. I couldn’t get twitter working so I feel a little ripped off that I couldn’t discuss what was being presented with anyone while it was being presented. I get a lot of insight from talking with people attending the event and twittering, and from twitters who read the tweets and comment. So I am going to give you a couple of my notes/interesting things that I wanted to share from the meeting. Call it a Friday thing.
“Dub” McNamara from F.L. McNamara Consulting gave a presentation entitled “Linking the PMO to the Organization’s Strategic Plan.”
He started off talking about the purpose and mission of the PMO office he currently works in, and then to a more general audience he did talk about how he perceived other peoples PMO offices to be. Here is a combination of what he said and what I thought as he was saying it.
A Project Management Office can manage projects in technology and process, sometimes they manage projects in sales, marketing, accounting etc. So they are a group of project managers that manage projects regardless of content. They get involved more with high risk/high profile projects for hands on management. The PMO has project management skills that other departments may or may not have. A lot of times an executive team will create a PMO when “nothing is getting done.” Lots of great projects with nothing coming to completion.
So with all this insight I had to ask myself, and maybe you would to: Does the person in marketing have the project management skills to successfully complete the project that was just assigned to him, what about that critical sales project that John just took on, or the team in IT, accounting, etc? Cathy Liggett, @cathyliggett on twitter, referred to this recently as a persons performance readiness.
Another service of a PMO can be Project Portfolio Management. PPM here refereeing to selecting, evaluating, and ranking project proposals. One point someone made in the meeting was that it was hard to get the departments to get you the information that you need to make the decision, and not only can it be difficult to get, but even more difficult to get information that is comparable. I had a good conversation about this with Mike Boudreaux, @mikeboureaux on twitter, during Product Camp Austin. His responsibilities at his company has him deal with similar issues.
“Dub” suggested that the PMO provide coaching and training to improve the performance readiness of managers and staffs to manage their own projects. I’ve seen other companies have a separate training department that might take this on. Or check out PMI’s website for info.
In a lot of processes one of the last steps is to review and learn, Stage Gate has a post launch review, and GOSPEL has Learning. Most would agree that having a review is valuable, but the consensus in the meeting was that it was pretty typical to have a hard time conducting the reviews. Besides, sometimes the reviews are planned when their is nothing that can be done about it. I think the trick would be to hold reviews when action can have impact, not when the opportunity is come and gone.
Getting into the meat of “Linking the PMO to the Organization’s Strategic Plan” “Dub” stresses the importance of asking the right questions. Here are some he suggests:
- What are the right projects and how are they identified and selected?
- What are the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic objectives/initiatives?
- Who determines the organization’s mission, vision, direction, and strategic objectives/initiatives?
- What are the goals of the organization?
- What is the process for determining the organization’s goals and objectives?
- What are the components of a “good” strategic plan?
*The Anthropology of Product Management CoP would want me to make sure to identify culture, taboos, tribes, etc. Check them out on twitter #AoPM or their LinkedIn group.
There was a lot of content in the meeting, and the next part was about one strategic planning process called the Balanced Score Card. I am sure that we will have lots of posts on the Balanced Score Card, cascading score cards, service balanced score cards, and just plain old score carding, so I am going to leave that for another day. I will say thought that one of the biggest differences between Balanced Score Card strategic planning and others is the more equal evaluation of projects across some form of four categories, Learning & Growth, Business Process, Customer, and Financial, not just Financial.
Because I didn’t get a chance to twitter about this meeting, I would love to pick up a conversation on this using the #PMI hashtag in twitter, and/or comments here.
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