Creating a successful integrated PMO in a hostile distributed environment

Abstract

Through a real-life case-study, this paper is the description of how multiple disparate interest groups with different agendas, different work cultures, different technologies, and some of them with quite low customer ratings were brought together to create and adhere to best practices, through a virtual PMO. This also explains how this new PMO, called eDelta, significantly enhanced customer ratings, new customer wins, employee happiness, and closer professional (and sometimes even personal) distributed working relationships, within a short span of one year time. The four best practices, that can be adapted to other organizations and countries are explained, which made this a project that produced tangible benefits in a short span of 14 months.

Introduction: The Need and the Background

EAS (Enterprise Applications and Services) is the division of a US$6 billion Indian multinational company consisting of a large number of Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics Products and Technologies, in terms of Enterprises applications implementations, upgrades, rollouts, and production support projects across the globe.

Over the last decade, Oracle has acquired more than 70 products in its portfolio and hence increased the complexity of its software and solutions delivery; however, customers are looking for one face for all Oracle Products, despite these products and solutions being heterogeneous and the only common thread being Oracle Corporation. The company also faced the same problem.

Each of the business units, spread throughout various locations in India, APAC, Europe, and United States, were working as conglomerate of several independent business practices, involved in various Oracle and Microsoft Enterprise Applications. These individual business units were following their own methodologies and templates and were not leveraging the resources, such as the best practices, tools, reusable templates, and methodologies available within the same company from other business units. All were reinventing the wheel and thought theirs were the best ways and were unable to capitalize on the productivity improvement, which they would have otherwise received.

Beside these, islands of various enterprise solutions practices and other stakeholders of the company, such as sales, quality, knowledge management, learning academies and so forth, were also working in their own silos and were not willing to appreciate the needs and constraints of others.

Another important point was that from a geographical standpoint, India itself consists of several states, each bigger than the typical European countries. Each state in India has its own cultural issues of projects working in different geologies, such as north India (‘Noida’ District), south India (‘Chennai’ district), East India (‘Kolkata’ District), and West India (‘Mumbai and Pune’ Districts). There were a few leaders based in Europe and the United States as well. When these people with different cultures were required to work together, many were very averse to the idea of working under a common PMO, for several reasons and some were even hostile.

As common in several organizations, there was hero worship for few key people who were successful once and “owned” the best practices in their own environment, preventing maturity of the organization, and were not willing to change because they had been already successful.

Missing was integration of various internal tools practiced in the organization (e.g., ‘arKMedes,’ the knowledge management tool; ‘PM Smart,’ the project management tool; OMS, the quality management system; and Knowledge Transition Framework, ASSeT etc.), leading to reduced use and the benefits of each of these tools.

There was no single and scalable platform available that could be used as a benchmark for service offering maturity, across the organization, or at least at the EAS level.

All this negatively impacted the business, leading to slow growth of business (low win-rate), lower profit margins in the industry, poor customer satisfaction score, projects costs, time overruns, and scope and quality disputes among the customers and different stakeholders within the company. This created a need to relook at the whole EAS in an integrated and holistic manner, and realize the benefit of effective PMO, despite several challenges, including strong personal resistances from several key multi-cultural, multi-location senior executives and project managers. This paper is the description of how these needs were met successfully, despite a slightly hostile environment.

Key Issues and Challenges

Following is the summary of the key challenges and issues addressed in this paper.

• Acceptability by different business units and enabling functions of the idea of a single PMO, due to ‘hero worship’ and ‘I am the best’ feeling, even for similar projects, but with different software technology products, from Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics.
• Integration of PMO with various other internal tool entities was a major challenge, with each one of the entities having its own island of ‘best’ tools, and not willing to consider others tools, which might be better.
• Cultural differences within and outside of India
• Change management across all the business units, having different ‘heroes,’ different work cultures, for a rigorous use of the PMO and benefits to the projects

Overview of the PMO, eDelta

eDelta, a virtual PMO, was created and launched covering various projects related to a large number of Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics product technologies. This became the EAS Delivery Transformation Portal, which played the role of virtual PMO and is now one-stop-shop portal for the whole ERP Delivery Team of the EAS Division, across the globe. Everything that the team requires, in terms of processes, methodologies, documents, templates, solutions, tools, accelerators, white papers, reusable components, and so forth, was available and facilitated through this single PMO Portal. Following is a short description of the key features of this PMO portal.

eDelta - Navigation (Exhibit 1)

eDelta – Navigation – Contd (Exhibit 2)

Business Imperatives

There are four key business imperatives in today's dynamic and competitive environment, which mandated the creation of a centralized virtual PMO

Quality of Deliverables: Today, customers expect quality and timely delivery as a necessary attribute, not just a ‘nice to have.’

Process Orientation is the Mantra — Today's matured and experienced customers want to ensure that the organization is driven by predictable and standardized processes and not by individual heroes, whose absence will badly affect the outcome. This is in addition to the cost factor.

Business Imperatives – Exhibit 3

Walk the Talk — Many companies just SHOW the PPTs and the processes to clients for getting the assignment, and actually don't use those processes in totality. But if, through a live portal, actual processes and its adherence and the benefits are shown clearly indicating the delivery capabilities, the processes in place, the ready-to-use documents in place, tools and accelerators available, ready-to-deploy reusable components, the customer is thrilled. The customer experiences the “Walk the Talk” and is more than delighted.

Capability and Maturity — Customers are increasingly interested in ensuring that the service providers, with which they would be partnering for the various service offerings, should also have high capability and high maturity. They are interested in visibly observing whether the service provided has the necessary capability; can it continuously improve in its service offering, as their relationship deepens; and can the service provider ensure higher progressive benefits to the customers.

eDelta, the virtual PMO addresses these four business imperatives and customer expectations and is designed for continuous improvements.

Solution Approach for creating the virtual PMO, eDelta

The development of PMO went through a very strategic and defined approach in order to ensure that this is scalable and is long term oriented

Solution Approach - Exhibit 4

The key features of eDelta:

• Streamlining: To streamline project execution of ERPs across all business units through a centralized virtual PMO. The centralized PMO would have the defined methodologies with detailed entry criteria, tasks, deliverables, validation, and exit criteria for each phase of the project execution

ETDX Diagram for one of the phases - Exhibit 5

• Best Practices: Provide best practices across business units (Oracle eBusiness, Siebel, as some of these are mentioned in Table 1 below) for improving productivity and project margin of projects. The framework was also used to ensure that best practices were collected, and agreed upon, and also agreed for continuous improvement in an ongoing manner from the various business units
• Scalability: Provide a single and scalable platform, which can be used as benchmark and service offering maturity
• Standardization: There were multiple product groups and services offerings, each offering its own methodology and working in silo, but were brought together in a common platform.

Table 1 - Key Product Groups and Service Offerings

The PMO Portal has now brought in a standard and integrated framework, called the iSure Framework, which has an integrated methodology for the various service offerings across key products groups and with a standardized methodology of execution.

iSure Framework - Exhibit 6

Standard Methodology

Table 2 - Methodologies

The portal also consists of more than 100 standardized documents and templates across all the business units and various services offerings.

• Reusable: eDelta had close to 50+ reusable solutions and accelerators, which can be leveraged in order to accelerate the implementation of ERP Products, resulting in reduced implementation cost to the customer and better margin for the projects
• Integrated with various enabling tools with one single PMO and provides the single window for all the consultants to leverage and make the best use of it
• Ensure various enabling functions to look at the common set of processes and prevent reinventing of the wheel
• Practice “Employee First, Customer Second” by enabling employees to create a “wow” factor with the customer
• Develop confidence in customers to showcase the strengths and success of uniform and better practices

Four Best Practices Developed

The top four best practices developed during the implementation of the PMO, which would be helpful to all interested are:

1. Dealing with ‘Hero’ Worship (Converting Conflicts into Opportunities)

A strong ‘Hero’ worship culture was prevalent among the various business units, which was basically the fact, that there were few sets of heroes who would have the expertise, hold on the knowledge, and would be glorified for any support required from them. The issue is that because of this, the individuals were growing, but the maturity of the organization did not grow. Best practices did not get shared, knowledge dissemination was not happening, there was no institutionalization of processes, leading to stagnation in organizational maturity. This also created a conflict in institutionalizing the methodologies and best practices across business units. However, this conflict was converted into opportunity by sensitizing the business unit leaders to the fact that the centralized virtual PMO would not take out their individual heroes or their brilliance, but it would only help in multiplying that effect across their entire team and in the process creating more heroes.

One of the most important aspects of resolving the ‘Hero’ worship culture was to ensure a change management across the organization, to create awareness, sensitize people about the availability of a PMO and resources, to address challenges of various business units having different ‘Heroes,’ different work cultures, and to bring in a rigorous use of the PMO and its benefits to the projects.

Change management and training were done during all the stages, right from piloting stage at the beginning to the launch stage. Be it for development of a common methodology/framework, converting development components as reusable, standardizing documents and templates—at every stage, sensitization to the leaders was done for the benefit of the virtual PMO. As part of change management, multiple webinars were run across the organization, several business benefit awareness sessions, called “Knock Out” Sessions were conducted, regular teaser emails before launch of any new release were sent, frequent updates via newsletters, and organization-wide daily communication—all these in order to ensure that all the key stakeholder understand, utilize, and contribute toward the virtual PMO. Of course, one of the most important aspects for the success of this was sponsorship of the Global Delivery Head of EAS, and his presence in many of these discussions, brainstorming sessions, and promising some rewards to the contributors in their annual performance appraisals.

Various Change Management Initiatives - Exhibit 7

2. Dealing with Cultural diversities and conflicts thru real partnership

Another important best practice related to how to create a successful integrated PMO, in a distributed environment with cultural diversities. From a geographical standpoint, India itself consists of several states, each bigger than the typical European countries. Each state in India has its own cultural issues of projects working in different geologies like north India (Noida District), south Indian (Chennai district), East India (Kolkata District), and West India (Mumbai/Pune Districts). There were a few leaders based in Europe and the United States as well.

There were numerous challenges purely from a cultural perspective also. For example, during the definition of methodology, in one area, the leaders were keen in having the methodology very short and crisp and did not want too much detail, which was primarily due to the culture of just providing high level details and expecting the teams to move forward. There were other leaders (in other areas), who wanted the methodology to be very detailed and have all the details to be available for the teams to directly use. A balance had to be struck between the two approaches, because being short and crisp without detailing, would take out the benefits of standardization and would again lead to custom methodologies, and a very detailed methodology would be equivalent to spoon feeding, wherein the nuances of each unique project would not be taken care. This was achieved through conducting workshops between leaders objectively debating on the pros and cons of each approach, working collaboratively, and ensuring that a final decision has been made, which is in the overall interest of the organization. The focus was more on the issues, rather than on the people. Some of the issues, which were very debatable, and the discussions kept on happening for long hours and were stopped with a time limit. Those were later on taken-up, sometimes with different groups of people from the similar projects. Some of the leaders were also brought face-to-face once or twice, where the cost of traveling was not very high, in the long-term interest of the benefit to the company.

3. Value Creation through Employee First, Customer Second

“Employee First, Customer Second” is the most important tenet in the company around which the organization transformation happened. The philosophy of Employee First, Customer Second, is that in order to provide value to the customer, the employees, who are the interface between the company and the customer in the value zone, need to be empowered and enabled in order to create value for the customer.

The Integrated PMO was also a step in that direction, which ensured empowerment of employees and enablement of the value zone.

In the past, without the availability of a virtual PMO, whenever an employee on the customer side needed any specific information, he or she had to reach back to the business unit, wait for the information, and then go back to the customer. This entire cycle had its own lead time, which delayed the employee interaction with the customer, and often led to their frustration. By making sure the virtual PMO was available and accessible to all, any information required could be quickly obtained through the PMO, without any time delay or lead time. This empowerment and enablement help the employees in creating value for the customer by providing solutions in a shorter turnaround time and ensuring customer satisfaction.

4. Building Customer Confidence

An integrated PMO portal, like eDelta, helps in building up the necessary customer confidence as well, because customers not only see but also experience, the capability and maturity of the organization in the various products and multiple service offerings.

In one of the customer visits to an offshore facility, a live walkthrough of the virtual PMO portal was done to the customer. This was after the customer had gone through the entire sales cycle, about the organization, the value that the organization brings to the customer, references to the PMO portal, and how that will benefit them. After the PMO portal walkthrough was completed, the customer's confidence levels have soared and were more comfortable with the organization's capability and maturity of delivering the services that they were looking for. In the words of one of prospective customer, “All the dots seem to be well connected, it was a very good use of our time and we are satisfied that all you sold us (tools and processes) actually exists and are implemented. We are happy that we shortlisted you and can confirm with you right now that you would be one of the finalists.”

Benefits Realization:

Finally, after six months of efforts in development and another eight months of execution, the following benefits have already been realized by this PMO eDelta.

Key Learning

• Best practices, like these four, can provide significant benefits to the program as a whole
• Valued by clients and becomes a differentiator against other vendors in strategic partnerships
• Strong management support, participation, and sponsorship are keys to success for converting conflicts to opportunities.
• Change management exercise is key and vital in such large initiatives, and continuous issues-based communication to all key stakeholders is mandatory.
• Content delivery in the portal should be user friendly, which ensures a larger hit count, leading to better utilization. End users must be involved in the process of designing the features and interfaces.
• Organization induction must include walkthrough of the PMO Portal, so that even new employees see the benefits and start using it.
• Stringent program management practice to be followed, as this requires strong governance and coordination with multiple stakeholders (Projects Team, QA Team, PMG, Portal Team, Senior Management, and so forth)

Conclusions

The single integrated PMO, called eDelta, was instrumental in integrating multiple business units, various enabling functions and multiple tools available, resulting in significant improvement in business wins, productivity improvement, better project margins, and scalability for future growth. This also provided multiple lessons learned in terms of challenges faced in setting up a PMO across a distributed environment. These learnings and the best practices can be adapted to other projects, organizations, and countries.