Charting the course

Stability sets the stage for prosperity. Without reliable prices and a stable currency, a country’s economy will be stunted by skittish investors and consumers. Even before the recent global recession, the Dominican Republic’s economy was mired in chaos. The annual inflation rate soared as high as 49 percent. Interest rates on Central Bank of the Dominican Republic (CBDR) bonds hit 35 percent. And the Dominican peso’s exchange rate fluctuated wildly, rarely to the benefit of the country’s consumers.

To fulfill its mission of delivering financial stability to businesses and the country’s 10 million residents, the CBDR created a four-year strategic plan in 2006. Chief among its goals: lower inflation and bolster the value of the peso to protect Dominican consumers’ purchasing power.

But a plan is only as good as its execution. Convinced that the bank’s performance hinged on choosing projects aligned to the strategy and then executing them through standardized processes, CBDR leaders approved the creation of a project management office (PMO).

BEST OF THE BEST

“Being nominated is recognition of the Central Bank’s effort over the last eight years. This has involved a lot of people, a lot of hard work and a lot of discussion internally. It has involved the whole institution.”

—Joel Tejeda, on being named a PMO of the Year finalist

“First there was the plan. Then came the PMO, to guarantee the plan was carried out,” says Eunice Duran, PMP, PMO lead and technical consultant, planning and budget department, CBDR, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

After 60 years of doing things the same way, however, the hierarchical organization was resistant to change. When the PMO launched in January 2007 with control over the bank’s entire project portfolio, its first challenge was to persuade each department to adopt standards that would allow the PMO to systematize how it planned, executed and documented projects.

“In very big and old organizations, departments tend to be like islands,” says Fabiola Herrera, director, payments systems department, CBDR. “So the PMO has had a hard time trying to make everybody understand that a project does not belong to one specific department, but to the organization as a whole.”

To secure stakeholder support throughout the bank, the PMO drew heavily on practitioner expertise to research and recommend policies and regulations. By 2010, Dominicans were seeing stable prices at the supermarket, investors were buoyed by a lower interest rate and stronger peso, and the country’s economy was on a growth trajectory.

Direction From the Top

Support for the PMO started at the top. The bank’s leadership—all the way up to the governor—knew that standardized project management processes were necessary to execute the bank’s ambitious strategy to help achieve its main goal: keep inflation low.

“Once the top management is convinced that this is important, it’s easier for the rest of the institution to absorb,” says Joel Tejeda, deputy manager, monetary, financial and exchange rate policies, CBDR.

With executive sponsorship secure, the PMO team began encouraging adoption of project management practices across the organization. The bank’s leadership was especially keen on having the PMO implement processes that would help the CBDR identify problems early on, make necessary adjustments and ensure projects were in sync with strategy.

By forging strong partnerships with project managers across the institution and positioning them as best practice facilitators rather than auditors, the PMO was able to change minds—and increase strategic alignment—across the bank’s departments, Mr. Tejeda says.

“The most important way to know if the PMO has been successful is the rate of compliance,” he says. “From 2006 to 2009, 57 percent of projects were not related to the strategic plan. Now, only 11 percent of projects are not related.”

Having the entire portfolio under the PMO’s management has also allowed the team to reduce redundancy, which has freed up resources to support projects that deliver greater value, Ms. Duran says.

“Resources are scarce,” she says. “So the PMO has guided the whole institution in the way that it prioritizes, assigns and balances resources according to the organizational strategy.”

The PMO’s robust management practices “enable us to only implement priority projects and execute them within the approved constraints of scope, cost and schedule,” Ms. Duran says.

One high-profile example was a 2008-2011 project to integrate the real-time gross settlement systems of the Dominican Republic and five neighboring nations. By increasing the speed at which money and securities are transferred (or “settled”) between banks, it promised to make the regional economy more efficient.

While its partners—Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador—were all on board, the PMO team knew that logistical complexities of working across borders could prove difficult. To avoid delays, the PMO gave the project consortium standardized processes that streamlined communications and helped each country move toward the shared goal. Defining the project’s objectives and then using the same forms, reporting tools and success measures throughout execution kept disparate teams on the same page, Ms. Herrera says.

“The PMO helped by giving us standards. It helped us speak the same project language.”

—Fabiola Herrera

“The PMO helped by giving us standards,” she says. “It helped us speak the same project language.”

BANKING ON SUCCESS

Wind in the Sails

With standardized processes in place and support for them growing, the PMO began working to identify other ways it could improve the bank’s performance, says Luis José Bourget, director, planning and budget department, CBDR.

“We give the national financial system the stability it needs in order to bring international investments here and improve the way the banks work. The PMO is working for the greater good.”

—Fabiola Herrera

“Two years after the PMO was founded, we started assessing our work and looking for outside information regarding our performance,” he says.

PMI’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3^®) helped identify and fill gaps in the PMO’s processes—and fueled even more progress.

“Increasing our project management maturity has helped us achieve strategic objectives at the institution at a much faster pace,” Mr. Bourget says.

Using OPM3, the PMO has uncovered new opportunities to improve its performance year after year. An internal benchmark drawn from OPM3 showed the team significantly increased its maturity. And the improvement process continues, Ms. Duran says.

“Each year after the evaluation, we note the processes we lack, those that would be useful and those we are ready to implement,” she says.

Improving documentation has been a central part of the PMO’s maturation. The move not only helps the PMO team identify relationships among projects and avoid redundancy within the portfolio, it also means teams aren’t doomed to repeat history.

Prior to the PMO, important projects were executed without leaving a paper trail, robbing future project teams of valuable lessons learned. “That’s very sad, from an institutional point of view,” Mr. Bourget says.

With in-depth project recordkeeping now the norm, the CBDR has improved project planning across the institution and allowed the PMO to deliver better results.

“With the project management methodology now in place, we have full documentation for over 400 projects that have been successful all along the way,” Mr. Bourget says. “And we have lessons learned and experiences to share with the community and with the future generations of central bankers.”

“Increasing our project management maturity has helped us achieve strategic objectives at the institution at a much faster pace.”

—Luis José Bourget

The Next Horizon

Since its launch, the PMO has not only improved the bank’s project performance, it has helped deliver macro-economic stability during a period of global financial turmoil and evolve the Dominican Republic’s financial system.

“Now a check can clear the next day,” Ms. Herrera says. “That’s a huge achievement for a country where check-clearing used to take two weeks.”

Other CBDR projects have made it easier for people in rural areas to open bank accounts. By supporting the departments that created a regulatory framework for smaller, sub-agency banks, the PMO indirectly helped individuals who never had a savings account get access to financial services. Another project the PMO helped with standardized accounts so that customers from different banks can transfer money in real time. Taken together, these initiatives are advancing the country’s economy.

“First there was the plan. Then came the PMO, to guarantee the plan was carried out.”

—Eunice Duran, PMP

“We give the national financial system the stability it needs in order to bring international investments here and improve the way the banks work,” Ms. Herrera says. “The PMO is working for the greater good.”

The PMO also supports economic development by fostering a culture of project management in both the public and private sector.

“Here in the Dominican Republic, businesses are paying a lot more attention to the project management specialization for their workers,” Mr. Bourget says.

Team members have also shared project management experiences at regional conferences and assessed the implementation of PMOs at other financial institutions.

“By fostering the project management community, we’re improving not just the enterprises but society as a whole,” he says. PM