Abstract
PMO. Over the years this three-letter acronym has seen much damage to its reputation, to the point that many people in various organizations in multiple industries recognize it like some dirty word that no child would dare to utter at the dinner table. It is the most widely attempted “organizational strategy” in just about every company that executes projects. Yet, year after year, we see PMOs drift to the bottom of the organizational abyss, one after another, ignored by the populace like an unmatched gym sock sitting in the corner of the locker room.
The purpose of the paper is to deal with the misconceptions about the failed PMOs and help attendees discover truly what the next generation of PMOs should become in the modern business organization to fulfill its mandate. That is, the next generation PMOs should be more than just a governance institution, more than a support organization, more than a method repository, and more than a training team. It must be a marketing machine. I will also share with the audience how one professional services organization has transformed its PMO by leveraging some simple marketing ideas with the business results to show for it.
Introduction – What Have We Done Wrong?
Historically, we have placed the focus of our effort in establishing a project management office (PMO) on the substance by which an organization governs its projects. Words like methodology, process, and standards poured out of communications and training curricula. Templates, user guides, process maps, and organizational structures were built and disseminated. Organizations have spent millions on enterprise project management tools automating processes, tracking project plans, and reporting on project and program performance. We have even convinced the C-suite executives and steering committees that they need to make fact-based decisions focused on return on investment (ROI) and earned value management (EVM) and other assorted combinations of metrics alphabet soup. But despite all of these worthwhile and sometimes transformational efforts, PMOs, one by one, continue to fall by the wayside. Leadership at all levels continues to question the necessity of such an organization despite having in place what we thought were the ingredients of success. What have we done wrong? Why is the PMO still a three-letter dirty word?
A Lesson in Organic Chemistry
Consider the following:
H2CO3
C6H12O6
C4H6N2
H3PO4
C8H10N4O2
Cryptic as they may be, these organic compounds make up the basis of something that is very common and popular in our everyday lives. The users of this type of product spend in excess of US$60 billion per year in the United States, according to Adams Business Media Research, and, contrary to our PMO implementation sense, the producers of this product spend almost no time and effort at all educating their customers about what the ingredients of their success are (Beverage/Drink Industry Statistics, 2014). Instead, they focus on something that has almost nothing to do with the product itself.
So what is this secret in organic chemistry? These are the building blocks of what we from the South affectionately called “Coke”—made up of carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, phosphoric acid, and caffeine, respectively.
Take a closer look at every Coca-Cola advertisement, promotion, or commercial, you will find that their focus is NOT the actual product itself. But rather, they are focused on the people who use their product. They focus on the value that they deliver to and for their end users!
Is there a lesson to be learned here for our PMOs? Have we been focusing so much on our composition that we have forgotten about exactly why we are necessary? Have you been so devoted to our ingredients that the product itself has somehow been forgotten? How is that the Coca-Cola Company can simply turn organic chemistry into “happiness?”
The Value Proposition
The answer to the question lies with our understanding of the true value and not just on the substance of what we are building. Unfortunately this is where most PMOs fall short of the mark. Most of us PMO leaders have never asked ourselves the question “What do our customers expect out of our PMO?” But rather, we walk into a room and let people know that we are here to do business and here are the processes that we are changing, here are the templates and forms we will be using, and here are the new tools that we will be deploying. By yesterday.
There is a cost and a price to everything—including PMOs. Adoption occurs when the perceived value outweighs the cost. Inversely, rejection occurs when the cost outweighs the perceived value. The secret sauce is a lot simpler than the rest of the Coca-Cola ingredients. Ask yourself, did your project stakeholder ever utter these words about your PMO:
“Why do I have to fill out another form?”
“I don’t have time for this new process.”
“This is too complicated… I’m going back to my spreadsheet.”
“I can’t afford this.”
“This is overbearing.”
How about from WITHIN your PMO? Ever heard something like these:
“We are wasting our time. Nobody cares.”
“They just don’t get it.”
“We are spinning our wheels and nothing happens.”
“Is my job still safe?”
The missing ingredient to our PMO problem is not one of “manufacturing,” but one of “marketing.”
The Mandates
Mandate #1: Think Credibility
Have you ever asked yourself, “Who am I?” Same thing could be and should be asked of any PMO. How well do you know yourself? And more importantly, are you improving HOW you deliver, rather than WHAT you deliver?
In order for a PMO to be credible and therefore relevant within an organization, you should ask yourself these questions:
- Can you deliver what you say you can deliver? Have you?
- Do you have the resources to deliver?
- What are your organizational constraints?
- Are you creating a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist?
- Are you asking for feedback? What do you do with it when you get it?
- Do your customers trust you?
A second question that you should ask yourself is “How well do I know my customers?” In fact, an even more fundamental question that you should ask is “Do I even know who my customers are?”
One of the most important things that a marketing strategy demands is that you study and assess your customers, that is, the people who value and accept what you have to offer.
- Do you know their strengths and their struggles?
- What is their tolerance for failure?
- What challenges are they facing?
- What are their “purchasing” constraints?
- Do they like you?
Obviously your product is important. What you bring to the table does matter, but what you bring to the table is more than just a “PMO in a box”—more than just policies, procedures, and a computer system to track everything. You must evaluate the strengths of the PMO leadership and the level of awareness of your customers and of how to leverage these strengths. You must evaluate what your customers care about in relation to what you can provide as a value-add. You must also take a critical look at yourself and determine how you will improve your weaknesses or shortfalls as an organization. And finally, you must articulate how you are going to solve their problems.
Your credibility also hinges on your approach. It is impossible to be all things to all people at all times, so we must set a course of action that is composed of both one-at-a-time as well as repeatable strategies.
You must establish a plan to reach your organization, one group or department at a time, one time period at a time. It is also crucial that you set up a repeatable strategy that anticipates customers’ needs, that delivers in stages, that delivers as promised, that is consistent, delivered personally, and relevant to their business operations and processes.
Mandate #2: Think Brand Appeal
Ever do a deep dive with your customers and find out their motivation? And yours? And that of the PMO? Engaging your customers in this fashion will require you to speak their language and work with them in a joint effort to discover and design a solution that will reduce friction and address pain points in the organization. In any organization there are many unknowns, so use surprise to your advantage. Always keep your critical stakeholders engaged and make it personal for them—by addressing their “what’s in it for me” concerns.
Help your stakeholders get started. Speed is always secondary to quality. Deploying a PMO haphazardly will not only cause adoption problems, it will also damage your reputation as a team. You must invest time to take an interest in them, and even leverage their own implicit egotism and self-interest to your advantage by utilizing positive social proof to promote your convictions and your experiences or past success.
If you’re missing social proof—if you are building out your PMO in a laboratory and no one else outside your PMO is engaged in the process, you’re going to have difficulty making your PMO relevant and gaining acceptance. And the opposite is also true. If you maintain significant social interaction, gaining trust and building community, then selling your PMO and getting adoption will be considerably easier.
Social proof can be achieved in several different ways. Allowing end users and stakeholders to provide publicly accessible reviews, comments, and ratings is one way to promote your PMO. Open forums and internal social media (such as Yammer) are also good ways to engage stakeholders and promote dialogue. Obviously you must also be aware of the possibility of negative reviews and reactions, and they must be managed with great care.
It may also be to your advantage to create “views,” which demonstrate access and accessibility. By making your content accessible, it encourages usage and it also encourages users to provide feedback to facilitate your continuous improvement activities.
Finally, a promotional campaign, the tried-and-true marketing solution, simply cannot be ignored. You should be able to penetrate your end users and stakeholders by highlighting your value-add and how your organization will seek to improve the way projects are executed and delivered and how the PMO will help them getting it done.
Mandate #3: Be the Right Leader
According to a Gallop research in 2013, only 29% of North American employees are emotionally engaged, prepared to produce greater revenue, and deliver better customer service. That means 71% are not engaged or are, in fact, actively disengaged (Gallup, Inc., 2013).
As a leader, you must foster relationships. John Maxwell once said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” At the core of making your PMO a success, not all leadership qualities are equal.
Great leaders have their own style of leadership (Blanken, 2013). Oprah Winfrey, known all over the word by her first name alone, picks a book to read and makes it a bestseller overnight, runs her own television network, and has more than 14 million Twitter followers. Her word can move the stock market and social issues. She is a charismatic leader. Richard Branson, the innovative leader, launched his first business at 16 and is the founder of the Virgin Group, comprising more than 400 companies in fields ranging from music to space tourism. He recently described his philosophy to Inc. magazine: “Dream big by setting yourself seemingly impossible challenges. You then have to catch up with them” (Branson, 2012). Tom Coughlin, the controversial head coach of the New York Giants, a stern taskmaster and disciplinarian never lost sight of his goal: winning Super Bowls. He is the commander leader. Donna Karan, the founder of DKNY, built an international fashion empire based on wide appeal to both women and men. Although she has spent less time creating her own designs since 2002, her vision lives on in the work of other designers, inspired by her laissez-faire leadership. Jeff Bezos, the pace-setting founder of Amazon, established the standard for the boom in e-commerce by creating a transactional interface that every other online merchant copied—the same people who are now following him to the cloud. Pat Summitt is the former head coach of the University of Tennessee women's basketball team who holds the record as the all-time winningest coach in NCAA history. Even as new players joined her team each year, she maintained a winning record (more than 1,000 victories and eight national championships over 38 years) by adapting her coaching to her young players' skills and needs. She is a situational leader. And finally, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield turned a $12,000 investment and a correspondence course on ice cream-making into a beloved international treat. They adopted a radical business philosophy dedicated to social responsibility and created a business model that allowed members of their customer community to become stockholders. By their transformational leadership, they have made Ben & Jerry’s ice cream a household name around the world.
Despite all of the great leadership qualities that we have looked at, there is one other that is perfectly suited for the longevity of leadership needs in leading and marketing your PMO. Herb Kelleher, the founder and former President, Chairman, and CEO of Southwest Airlines, is known for his passion for people. His philosophy of “if you treat your people right, then they will treat the customers right” set a strong foundation for the success of an organization in the historically challenging airlines industry. Herb Kelleher adopted the leadership style that is known as Servant Leadership.
A servant leader puts the interests of those he leads before self-interest and consistently involves his team in decision-making. He is first and foremost a facilitator who provides the tools that his team needs to achieve success by fostering lasting interpersonal engagement among team members. He tends to stay out of the limelight and allow his team to deliver results and gives them the credit for their success. Servant leadership is critical to a PMO because it is highly dependent on knowledge, experience, and expertise at the working level of the project infrastructure and by enabling the PMO team to engage the rest of the stakeholders and not concentrating knowledge at the upper echelon of the leadership tree so that the goals of the PMO can be widely promoted and will readily penetrate those who are executing projects.
Mandate #4: Think Strategically, Act Operationally
Strategy without action is like a car without a motor. No matter how well you can steer, you are still not going anywhere. You need to put together and enable your team to be fully engaged in the problem-resolution process. They should be enabled to DO, not just to think. You as the leader must define your expectation of success and then let loose your team and let them take your vision and turn them into actionable and realistic steps. The success of a strategy can be measured by how well you accomplish the day-to-day tasks that lead to the results that you expected and the lasting and profound impact of your leadership is accomplished in a job well done, not just well thought.
Above all else, you must keep your customers in the loop. Your end users and stakeholders must be active participants in the identification your strategy, planning of your actions, execution of your plan, and the measurement and accountability of the end results. Adoption and continuous improvement of your PMO requires that you have an active customer base that is willing and able to provide you the necessary feedback, both positive and negative, to help you fashion future goals for your PMO.
Mandate #5: Build a Marketplace for Critical Skills
According to a 2012 Deloitte survey5 of employees who plan on staying with their current employer, 72% feel that their talents are being utilized effectively. And according the same research in a survey of those who are looking for new employment, 42% believe their skills and abilities are not being used effectively. (See Exhibit 1.)
Exhibit 1 – Employee engagement
These two statistics paint a very telling picture. Effective engagement translates into a satisfied project team. And a satisfied and productive PMO team is crucial to a PMO’s continuous success.
When we think of establishing and maintaining critical skills, the first thing on which we place our focus is training. Training is definitely of importance in this process; however, training by itself is incomplete. We must shift our “training” mentality to a “learning” mentality. Training is the delivery of information and knowledge through which the proper behavior is demonstrated, but there is no requirement after the delivery of such information to compel a person to change his behavior or to follow up to ensure that proper behavior is achieved. Learning, however, involves a process of absorbing the knowledge in order to increase skills and, more importantly, to make use of it in a variety of contexts. The focus of learning is the application of knowledge, not just the delivery of it.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker), knowledge workers spend 38% of their time searching for information and identifying people with whom to talk. Traditional classroom training has delivered minimal results in terms of knowledge retention. Because learning style is different for different people, quality and depth of theoretical training is insufficient. A successful learning program encompasses a broader range of activities beyond the traditional classroom. It should involve an easily accessible, timely, and contextually relevant environment in which traditional training is to be delivered. In addition, learning cannot be confined to just the classroom. Learning must be reinforced throughout the PMO organization.
Learning involves diagnosing skills and knowledge needed by your end users and developing a competency strategy. Learning also involves understanding the skill gap of your team members by going beyond the traditional resume, that is, you must have a more accurate picture of their interests, behavior, and potential value. And finally, you need to identify ways to close the skills gap—across every level of the organization.
In addition to “learning by theory,” you should also make your PMO experts available to your stakeholders and end users by identifying mentors and coaches who are available to share their knowledge. You must also establish a knowledge base so that when information is required, information can be readily accessible. Your knowledge base must be readily available, easily accessible, highly visible, and you must encourage input. There is nothing worse than a stagnant network of hard drives full of a disorganized hodge-podge of PowerPoint files! The content of your knowledge base must be relevant to your PMO organization, processes, projects, and customers—and the relevancy must be easily identifiable to your end users.
And, by the way, you must do this across all levels of your PMO. The best way to do this is to leverage the existing social networks that are prevalent in your organization. Social networks facilitate and encourage real-time communications by reducing the organizational communication structure and allowing people to communicate the way they want whenever they want. Discussions and interactions are facilitated in a safe environment and it cultivates a culture of creativity and authenticity. This is the condition under which your PMO expertise and knowledge can be proliferated without the end users feeling like they are under the pressures of a sledgehammer from above.
Summary
If there is ever a one-size fits all approach to implementing a PMO, this is probably the best starting point. You must know your chemistry: know your PMO and know your organization. There are telltale signs about the best approach you should take to engage the world beyond the walls of your PMO to gain adoption. You must find your happiness: know your customers and know what they expect and what will work for them. You have to make your value proposition widely known by your customers and compel them to adopt. You must maintain credibility, broaden your appeal and focus on retention of your expertise. You should create a culture of servant leadership, as your PMO ultimately is a service and support organization—delivering the backbone of hows and whys to allow your end users and project managers to achieve success. You as the PMO leader must be good at strategy and also be good at operations. And finally, you must go beyond training and share your knowledge, market your experts and your knowledge champions, and leverage the social networks within your organization to proliferate your PMO and its message.