Onboarding with Success

When you’re asked to jump on a new project how do you go about doing that to ensure your best chance for success? That may often depend on why you’re being asked to take over the project … and it can be for any one of the following reasons:

• Previous project manager failed to manage the team and project effectively
• Previous project manager lost the customer’s confidence
• Previous project manager lacked the expertise to lead the project based on new direction
• An emergency necessitated an early departure for the project manager
• Co-management became a necessity due to changes on the project Read more »

Criteria for Successful Project Management Offices

I was recently reviewing articles that I’ve written about successes and failures of Project Management Offices (PMOs) and some of the things that make that success or failure happen. I started making a list of these items and thought it might be helpful to share that info with the readers here on PM Tips again in this very condensed format. Remember, these are just my opinions that I’ve expressed in some of my articles along the way.

For PMO to be Effective:

• Director must be a key role in the organization
  • Must have backing and support of executive management
• Director must champion the efforts of the PMs
  • Don’t take credit for their actions
  • Provide ongoing support
  • Assist on critical/visible projects
  • Help breakdown resource acquisition barriers
• Director must run the PMO, not many projects
  • Project focus for the director should mainly be on the highly visible projects where exec decision-making is going to be needed on a regular basis or the business is extremely critical to the organization
  • Organization must value the PMO enough to ensure the director is not bogged down too much to be a successful leader

PMO Promotion

It is the responsibility of the PMO leadership to properly promote the PMO and help ensure its viability and visibility. Its viability is maintained by doing the following:

• Implementing proper and repeatable processes to consistently and successfully manage projects
• Implementing consistent templates for managing project and reporting status to customers and executive management
• Hiring competent, experienced Project Managers to lead projects for the organization
• Implementing proper compensation plans to retain good PM resources
• Implementing adequate training and on-boarding programs and processes to ensure that PMs are well-trained and up to speed on the PMO processes and practices

The PMO’s visibility is maintained by doing the following:

• Reporting project portfolio status on a regular basis and in a meaningful and useful format so that executive management realizes the PMO’s value
• Implementing solid PMO practices to ensure that the high-visibility customers are happy and referencable and the high-visibility projects are successful
• Inviting executive leadership to regularly attend weekly PMO meetings and sit in on project status meetings for the critical, high-visibility projects
• Managing project budgets thoroughly and reporting budget status up through executive leadership to show bottom-line PMO and Project Manager value

The PMO Director, as the leader of the PMO, must be a strong leader with pull inside the organization to ensure that these things happen. Otherwise, the PMO runs the danger of becoming obsolete or, at the very least, insignificant…and the mission critical projects will pass right by the PMO to special teams outside the PMO’s jurisdiction. Executive leadership must see value and ensuring that happens begins with the PMO leadership.

PMOs fail usually for one of the following three reasons:

• Lack of strong, focused leadership
• Lack of repeatable process
• Lack of executive leadership support

Five Signs Your PMO is not Meeting Your Organization’s Needs:

• Executive Management is not Included in the PMO Process
• Training Plans are Non-Existent
• Common Templates and Processes do not Exist
• Poor Upward Project Reporting
• Major Projects Circumvent the Process

All successful PMOs feature four basic components:

• The right processes
• The right tools
• The right people
• Executive level organization support

You can always hire different people. You can bring in consultants to help define better processes or identify better tracking tools. But without the executive-level support, none of it will happen or at least it won’t succeed.

Successful PMOs make an impact on organizational success by performing the following tasks:

• Aligning project delivery with strategic business goals and priorities
• Requiring that every project have an effective PM
• Implementing an appropriate PM methodology
• Consistent management and oversight of the project portfolio
• Obtaining and maintaining company leadership support

A Successful Project Doesn’t Equal Good Project Management

In the article “Good Project Management Doesn’t Guarantee Project Success” I discussed the concept that no matter how good the PM leadership is, there’s still no way to guarantee the success of your project due to the infinite number of factors that can affect the outcome of an engagement. The best you can do is focus on good, sound, fundamental project management, solid leadership, and some creativity and hope for the best. There is no magic formula to guarantee success.

Just Getting By

Likewise, the converse is true. Just because you had a successful project outcome, that does not mean that good project management was practiced. There’s always the possibility that luck was a factor. The project may have been a no-brainer…fairly easy with few, if any risks. I’ve seen bad project managers have very successful outcomes. And I’ve seen very experienced project managers bomb. And by bad project managers, I mean poor leaders who lack the experience, enthusiasm, technical knowledge, attention to detail, and organizational skills to truly be competent leaders of an important engagement. I’m sure we’ve all encountered these PMs…and they’re often “playing” in the PM role and it’s not their primary role or desire.

Can’t Rely on Luck

Obviously, luck isn’t what’s going to carry us to any degree of success in our lives and careers. Thankfully, we can focus on sound practices and principles to greatly increase our odds of having successful project outcomes on a regular basis. Back to the Basics – that’s my motto when things seem to be straying off course. Stick with what you have in hand:

• Manage to the schedule and manage the schedule wisely and closely
• Manage risks and issues like your life depends on it
• Keep the communication level high with both your team and the customer
• Rule the budget with an iron fist – both in terms of scope management and in the efforts that your team is charging to the project (remember, they have other projects they’re working on…watch closely for over charging due to laziness)
• Maintain your weekly schedule of regular project activities – hold status meetings even if not much is happening (don’t let time pass during a lull in the project…your busy team members can drift away) and deliver status reports and revised schedules on the same regular basis no matter what

Summary

Remain consistent. Your team members are likely reporting to other project managers on other projects also. Stay focused on your projects and keep your team and the customer well-engaged by remaining consistent during the busy times and during the slow times on the project. Your project resources are basically like teenagers…they need organization and structure or they’ll find it on another project.

Luck may get you through an easy project here and there, but as we know the truly no-brainer projects are few and far between. It’s much more likely that you’ll encounter a fair degree of risk and chaos on most engagements. Stay firm to the sound PM practices that got you this far and the goals of your organization and you should be successful more frequently. If only there was a guarantee for success….

How to Make Your PMO More Visible

Visible? Did I say visible? What I think I really mean is viable. We all want our Project Management Office (PMO) to be visible, right? And, if the projects are flowing through it like they should be, then it probably is visible. The scary part is when some projects flow through it and others – possibly the big ticket, high dollar projects – aren’t.

Separate is Not Equal

It’s not wise to segregate like that. I worked at one very large aviation and engineering company in the late 90’s and early 2000’s leading all internal web development projects just prior to helping them build their PMO. There was an internal struggle to be the web project provider between our group, the Internet Team, and the other group, the Graphic Design Team. I truly was some strange internal political struggle. Our team eventually came out on top meaning all web development projects were channeled through us, but it was strange to see such an internal battle going on like that.

The same can be said for the PMO and the projects that are allowed to run through it. If you have a PMO in place, or are building one, then all projects should at least run THROUGH it – if not all are run BY it. All projects should be tracked by the PMO and status reporting should be run up through the PMO, even if the project ends up being managed elsewhere within the organization. If the high visibility projects aren’t even being channeled through the PMO for documentation and tracking, then you have a real problem brewing.

PMO Promotion

It is the responsibility of the PMO leadership to properly promote the PMO and help ensure its viability and visibility. Its viability is maintained by doing the following:

• Implementing proper and repeatable processes to consistently and successfully manage projects
• Implementing consistent templates for managing project and reporting status to customers and executive management
• Hiring competent, experienced Project Managers to lead projects for the organization
• Implementing proper compensation plans to retain good PM resources
• Implementing adequate training and on-boarding programs and processes to ensure that PMs are well-trained and up to speed on the PMO processes and practices

The PMO’s visibility is maintained by doing the following:

• Reporting project portfolio status on a regular basis and in a meaningful and useful format so that executive management realizes the PMO’s value
• Implementing solid PMO practices to ensure that the high-visibility customers are happy and referencable and the high-visibility projects are successful
• Inviting executive leadership to regularly attend weekly PMO meetings and sit in on project status meetings for the critical, high-visibility projects
• Managing project budgets thoroughly and reporting budget status up through executive leadership to show bottom-line PMO and Project Manager value

The PMO Director, as the leader of the PMO, must be a strong leader with pull inside the organization to ensure that these things happen. Otherwise, the PMO runs the danger of becoming obsolete or, at the very least, insignificant…and the mission critical projects will pass right by the PMO to special teams outside the PMO’s jurisdiction. Executive leadership must see value and ensuring that happens begins with the PMO leadership.

Summary

I’ve personally helped setup PMO’s and I’ve personally watched PMO’s fail. They’ve always failed for one of the following three reasons:

• Lack of strong, focused leadership
• Lack of repeatable process
• Lack of executive leadership support

The PMO must be formed and move forward with all three of these in place to ensure it’s success.

Project Management: No Room for Haste, Planning Always Wins

Winging It

Ever had one of those days when you just wanted to ‘wing it?’ I think we all have. My oldest son wanted to just ‘wing it’ on his first attempt at passing the written driving test for his license. That didn’t work. My 3^rd son wanted to just ‘wing it’ on his graduation speech. That didn’t work too well either. When my kids want to just ‘wing it’ on getting their chores done without looking at the checklist, something usually gets missed. I’ve seen organizations who were overconfident just ‘wing it’ on a proposal for new work with an established customer and I’ve seen that fail miserably.

I’ve come to the conclusion that just ‘winging it’ is usually not a good idea. We’ve all heard the quote…”Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Sounds solid to me. Likewise, being too hasty in making decisions or moving forward is usually not a good idea either. Proverbs 19:2 states “Zeal without knowledge is not good; a person who moves too quickly may go the wrong direction.” How true is that?! Wow…the Bible even applies to Project Management…gotta love that!

Everyone Needs a Plan

I’m not talking about micro-management here…that’s for sure…but everyone needs a plan. Everyone usually works better with a plan. We all work better with a job description, right? Even if we have one of those jobs where we get to basically write our own job description, we still need something on paper because that’s what we’re measured against. That’s how someone determines if we’re doing a good job or not and it usually helps us to get a raise (or not!).

The same goes for a project. We need a budget we’re measuring against. We need resource hours and forecasts we’re measuring against. We need a project schedule with milestone dates and tasks laid out for our team so that we can measure our progress against it. And we need requirements to build against, otherwise we don’t know what we’re building and we certainly won’t know when we’re done building. Without a plan, the work may never end.

Planning is Key

This all brings us back to planning is key. It starts at the beginning of the engagement and never ends until deployment has been achieved. Why? It would be great if you could put together a project plan at the beginning of the engagement that would never need changing. That would mean that requirements never changed, resources never changed, and the customer – or your company – never did anything to alter the course of your project. That, of course, never happens. In fact, on a typical project, I probably tweak the project schedule a couple of times a week due to slight changes and new information that comes out of status meetings with the team or customer…or both.

Some key reasons why planning never ends during a typical project:

• Customer requirements change
• Resources move on/off the project
• Funding for the project changes
• Availability of a key input to the project changes or is pushed out (resource, data, etc.)

Not Too Fast…Plan First

Moving too fast too early is not a good thing. On small projects – especially internal projects for a business unit within my own organization – I’ve had skilled development resources that wanted to move forward with work on the solution before I’ve had a chance to work through all the requirements with the project sponsor. Moving too fast too early like that can take us back to that 2^nd part of Proverbs 19:2… “a person who moves too quickly may go the wrong direction.” Re-work is costly and frustrating and it adversely affects the project timeline….as well as customer satisfaction. Create a plan, enforce and manage to that plan and keep your team focused on that plan. “Winging it” just isn’t an option for the Project Manager.