In my previous posting we looked at the why and the what of the PMO. In this section I will focus on how a PMO comes into being and why sometimes it seems to come up against barriers to its effectiveness.
A newly created PMO will typically be closely monitored from within the business. Supportive senior managers will be watching to see where they can provide constructive criticism and support to the fledging PMO whereas the inevitable doom-sayers will be waiting for the first perceived “failure” to leap in with negative criticism. Why should this be? If a PMO is established because it is recognised that there are failings in the business, then it follows that there will be those within the business who are responsible for those failings perhaps through lack of expertise, misguided or misplaced over-enthusiasm, deceptive behaviour or simple incompetence.
If we assume that the PMO reaches a point where it is seen to be adding value or, at the very least, reducing waste, then the PMO will often be given a “profit target” to be achieved either through the demonstration of actual cost etc. savings (in comparison with historic performance) or by be deemed to be a “profit centre”. The latter approach then requires the PMO to charge for its services to the rest of the business. When that stage is reached, functional managers at different levels will see their budgets affected especially if they too are “profit targeted”. A service (project management) that had been “free-issue” to them would now cost them real money, and so the barriers start to go up.
One final problem area worth mentioning is the “not-invented-here syndrome” often expressed as “we were doing okay without all this PMO nonsense!”. This may arise when a PMO is established without a proper understanding of how things are being done in different parts of the organisation. That should not, of course, happen as the PMO project should be led from the beginning by professionals aware of the need to carry out stakeholder and risk analyses at the outset, but if those professionals are not already in situ then it follows that such things may not happen as they should.
Some readers may feel that the views expressed above are rather cynical but I prefer to think of it as “healthy scepticism” which helps me to keep things in perspective! Establishing, developing and maintaining an effective PMO will bring many things into the spotlight and although it is fervently hoped that in today’s enlightened business world no-one works in a “blame culture”, there may well be individual casualties and collateral damage within the organisation as a whole.
I give you two real life scenarios from the motor industry to reflect upon.
The first features a company specialising in production-line support facilities for which a 5-day training workshop was created and delivered to over 100 of its PMO staff at all levels. The training was a great success and produced spin-off benefits such as a review of the company’s procurement policy when it was found that PMO managers working with different client companies were buying the same component from the same supplier and paying vastly different unit prices!
At the closing working, a Director of the company was heard to say, “I don’t know why we needed all that, we did all right before”. Unfortunately for him, his Managing Director was present at the time and shortly after fired the Director!
The second relates to a company working within motor sport. Everything the company did was treated as a project yet it was a functional organisation with heads of function constantly fighting turf wars and not co-ordinating their resource inputs.
This company also received the 5-day training workshop together with the recommendation that their organisation structure should be revised to reflect the project-driven nature of the business. The need for this had been recognised to some extent because a newly-appointed director of operations had created a simple PMO but which had only a “head of” and two “programme managers” whose roles were not understood outside the PMO. The operations director agreed that a “projectised” organisation structure would best address the needs of the company and proposed the creation of dedicated cross-functional teams with the PMO providing professional assistance and oversight. This was rejected out of hand so he resigned!