PMO: Obsolete Before It Gets Off the Ground

9 Responses to “PMO: Obsolete Before It Gets Off the Ground”

1. Frank Winters Says:
   February 4th, 2004 at 3:15 pm

   Thanks Glen and Mike – I agree. Both PMO and Portfolio Management are useful tools.

   PMO is a tool that, among other things can help organizations ensure the dollars being spent on IT are for the business initiatives that the org actually needs.

   Portfolio management is another related tool — the two should be used together — to help prioritize and choose between project investments competing for limited resources.

   One way to look at this is that the PMO is a tool the CEO can and should use — a kind of lens into projects from the CEO’s viewpoint. Portfolio management is a tool that provides a lens into projects for the CFO.

   None of these tools or any of the others we discuss, support or disparage are to be used by themselves as silver bullets. Organizations need a system of PM approaches and tools if they are to be successful in their project work.

   While team spirit and morale is key to project success, managing projects as purely separate efforts is not an option for large corporations who wish to behave as learning organizations and who wish to get value for money spent on project work.

   PMO is an example of an excellent idea that is difficult to implement well. However, it’s worth the effort because when its done properly the results, as Mike points out, are excellent.

2. Frank Winters Says:
   February 4th, 2004 at 3:41 pm

   Mary, I don’t believe the issue here is which approach trumps another.

   Business practices require prediction. You can’t have unlimited or even undefined resources to pursue an objective. At evry point in the process you must estimate the resources you need.

   A healthy corporate culture will allow for variation throughout the PM process — that’s what change management is about, after all.

   But, — I don’t understand the attempt to define what techniques trump others. Archibald isn’t doing this — he is stating some facts of project management life. These facts are particularly relevant when the project is tasked with building complex systems that must include a well defined architecture at the backbone. Such systems can’t be constructed a little bit at a time.

   Complex projects require many tools and techniques, none of which can be used effectively without the support of many others. Integrating the tool set needed for each particular project is a major part of project planning.

3. Hal Says:
   February 5th, 2004 at 2:01 am

   I am an advocate of choosing which projects to invest in. I’m also cognizant that skunk works projects offer tremendous opportunites. 3M has done quite well that way as have numerous other firms including Lockheed.

   I’m a quant guy by education. I studied economics and operations research. I used to believe that smart people with experience should do the planning. Separating planning from execution and control made perfect sense. I gave that up long ago.

   Each project is unique if for no other reason but the intersection of the lives of the project participants makes it unique. Consequently, we must design the way we engage on the project and with each other if we want to be successful.

   I don’t buy ‘best practices’. Nor do I think that central groups operating detached from the project can provide useful guidance for individual teams. And the Chief Project Officer? Aargh! No, wait a minute. That doesn’t capture my sentiment. I have to scream!

   PMO, PPM, and CPO are all an expected centralizing response to the woeful performance of projects. IT projects are bad. Construction projects are as well. There is so much intelligence available that goes unaccessed in our project environments. If we are to harness that intelligence, then we must go to distributed models not centralized ones.

4. Hal Says:
   February 5th, 2004 at 5:12 am

   Frank,

   What do you mean by your last sentence?

   I called the PMO, PPM, CPO movement a centralizing response to current dissatisfaction with project performance. It’s a usual response. The pendulum swings from centralized to decentralized and then back again. The swinging doesn’t matter. We need to understand projects as fundamentally human endeavors that can only succeed by engaging humanly. Scrum and lean projects give us better results because the approaches are at the center about how people interact.

   As I said at the beginning of my prior comment, I favor choosing which projects to fund and in what order to do projects. Those choices can be made in many ways all of which can be tied to the business plan.

5. Frank Winters Says:
   February 5th, 2004 at 4:53 pm

   Hal,

   I accept the idea that adding agile techniques will improve theory and if applied, practice.

   I just don’t want to throw out all of the traditional methods to make room for agile.

   Frank

6. Hal Says:
   February 5th, 2004 at 6:18 pm

   Perhaps people said the same Newtonian physics when Einstein came along.

7. Joe Ely Says:
   February 5th, 2004 at 7:37 pm

   Super discussion guys. Thanks for doing it in public so all of us can benefit. I really mean that. Thank you.

8. Frank Winters Says:
   February 5th, 2004 at 8:27 pm

   Hal,

   Wait a minute — I’m no Newton, are you project management’s Einstein? (As I recall, he wasn’t right about everything either.)

   ; >)
   Frank

9. Frank Winters Says:
   February 5th, 2004 at 8:28 pm

   Joe,

   Thanks very much for the encouragement! (but I guess this group doen’t need too much, right?)

   Frank

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