Aligning PM Collaboration Systems & Standards
Project customers and executive stakeholders operate in a highly competitive market and are under ever increasing pressure to deliver more value, more quickly, and with fewer resources. Knowing that the promises made by sales and product management, must be kept by PM teams, they look to the PM office for competitive solutions. The PM office is responsible not only for delivering on commitments, but also for building the delivery reputation that will lead to repeat business and increased customer loyalty. Nothing is as critical to customer satisfaction and loyalty (or future sales) as an efficient and high quality delivery experience at the hands of a truly professional PMO.
To win in the quest for performance excellence, the PMO can rely on two key weapons, 1. QA standards (policies, procedures, metrics, …) and 2. Collaboration systems (CS). This is common knowledge and many PMO’s do their level best to meet the challenge. The difficult reality however, is that many fail to realize their vision, due in large part to a failure to synchronize the standards and tools within these two complex and inter-dependent solution spaces.
QA standards exist to ensure consistent and improving project management performance and product quality while collaboration systems exist to increase productivity. Top PMO’s consistently align their CS platform to conform to and enforce their PMO standards, thereby setting the stage for world class performance. A simple but very effective formula that is the hallmark of the best in class PMO.
So what’s the catch? While QA standards are tailored by each PMO to meet their specific needs, one size fits all PM collaboration systems are not. CS platforms are delivered as finished goods based on fixed process and data models that don’t align with any given PMO’s existing standards. CS that do provide some level of configuration flexibility are expensive out of the box, but implementation costs, duration, and complexity increase dramatically with the amount of flexibility offered. As a result, synchronizing a standard with a collaboration system can be extremely challenging, time consuming, and expensive.
In addition, the risk of failure increases with inexperience. While well synchronized CS and standards systems vastly improve performance, poorly synchronized systems have the opposite effect. For this reason, it’s critical that PM organizations exhibit a great deal of care and due diligence in platform selection and configuration. Otherwise, they face the specter of having spent a great deal of time and money only to end up worse off than they started.
In order to meet the challenge, the QA-PMO team must make process engineering and improvement the top priority. CS (tools) must be driven by process and not the other way around. QA process cannot be constrained by the limitations of an off-the-shelf (OTS) PM collaboration system, without suffering in terms of its effectiveness in improving PMO performance. Instead, the CS must act as an extension of PMO process, no matter what form it takes. The CS must be tailored to facilitate PMO process and information requirements, and be able to change with them over time. This may (and often does) force development a custom CS solution, or force the decision to delay the adoption of any CS at all. It’s that important.
As a result, you won’t be surprised to find out that most top PMO’s, only get to be top PMO’s because they exist within large organizations with the deep pockets needed to support expensive in house solutions. It makes them very difficult to compete with. That said, smaller organizations can achieve most of these capabilities through disciplined adherence to a well conceived long term evolution plan, provided they have the architectural and planning expertise in house. Such an evolution must always begin with standards definition and compliance, and finish by reinforcing those standards with intelligent CS development and integration decisions. CS acquisition/development is by far the most difficult and risky step.
Building a top PMO is difficult but, not impossible. I’d offer this advice to most PM office leaders serious about engineering a solid operational evolution path:
- Focus 1st on standards definition and compliance, and don’t worry about the CS solution until you’re satisfied that your QA discipline and culture is working, healthy, and improving
- When it comes time to begin work on a CS solution, build your CS requirements / selection criteria based on the minimum requirements of QA standards. The CS should provide elegant standards automation, enforcement, and be able to support standards evolution.
- Use off-the-shelf if a satisfactory solution exists, but don’t be afraid to consider a custom solution if the business case will support it.
- Get help. PM office organization and automation is very complex in terms of definition and implementation, which pales in comparison to the level of expertise required to introduce the change within your organization. Initiate detailed discussions with multiple firms, and move when you know it’s right.
- Treat the process like the most challenging project your PMO will ever face – you won’t be far off the mark.
Finally, don’t try to boil the ocean, solve world hunger, … pick the colloquialism you like best; the point being, it’s fine to develop a comprehensive end CS solution and evolution path, but when it comes to implementation, move forward in small increments. Build the PM office one value added sub-system at a time, to allow yourself to learn as you go and validate your results a piece at a time. That may help to identify any misdirection early on, so that appropriate review and re-vectoring can take place to achieve the best possible end results over the long haul.
PMOSoft provides synchronized PM Office information and quality management systems (web applications & procedures), and consulting expertise needed to achieve the PMO mandate in as little as 3-4 months. Please visit us at http://pmosoft.com to learn more and call us when you’re ready to take your PMO to best in class.
