Well, as they say at the races, Ils sont partis! … the gates are open and the horses are away: the PMO of the Year Award competition is off to a running start. Already I am getting questions from prospective applicants, and from some of last year’s applicants who are ready to try again. One fellow asked me if I could tell him where his organization stood in the rankings, which isn’t really an answerable question, since we didn’t sort or rank below the top six or so who formed the pool from which we chose the winner and finalists. (This is by way of saying, please don’t write and ask me this question!)

What I could do, and what was interesting, was to glance at the evaluation form that had come back from the judge. His PMO had scored high in almost every area; but the area where the judge had reservations was whether or not the PMO had business impact on the organization as a whole.

And, there it is in a nutshell: whether your PMO is a winner or a loser (and I am not just talking about the award here) all hinges on business value and/or perceived organizational impact.

I say perceived because I think that many PMO directors still have not realized that there’s a large component of marketing communications, not only in establishing a PMO, but in institutionalizing it. I’ve written before that PMOs are vulnerable to their own success: once the systems for executing strategy through well-run projects are in place, it’s tempting to think you can rest on your laurels. But, no such luck. When project and program management is working well, it’s invisible: nothing bad happens. And the PMO becomes, apparently, a line item of overhead.

So, the perennial question PMO directors have to answer is: What have you done for me lately?

Implementing a measurement program within the PMO that tracks the benefits provided can provide those answers, but only if it’s wisely designed. Too often, PMO leadership self-measures by metrics I can only call navel-gazing: numbers of people trained in PM, schedule compliance, numbers of project completed, and the like. They forget that a key piece of their role is as liaison with the executive level, and their metrics need to measure things that the executive level cares about.

So, you trained 100 people and they got their PMPs. So what? Aaron Coffman at American Power Conversion (a 2006 award finalist, mentioned in my last post) matched PMP achievement with dollars earned or saved due to projects being delivered on time. Bingo!

It’s not always about money, of course. The 2007 winner, Norton Healthcare, succeeded in large part because the PMO made sensitivity to the needs and concerns of clinical staff paramount. “How will this impact hospital staff?” was a central question involved in selecting and prioritizing the portfolio. Consequently, they have been able to pull off massive capital building and technology projects without ticking off the doctors who run the place … in fact, making themselves indispensable.

So, helping the executive level to perceive the value of the PMO is an exercise in walking a mile in non-project management shoes. What are the drivers of value in your organization? Answering that question is a good place to start.

Join us for more along this same line at our Webinar, Unlocking the Value of Your PMO, next Thursday, March 11. “See” you there.

Since today kicks off the 2010 PMO of the Year Award application period (see the contest information, and download application materials here), and since I’ve been writing a series about roles in the PMO, it seems a good time to review the previous winners of the award, and see what they have in common with regard to people management.

One thing that’s immediately apparent is the quality of PMO leadership. It’s been my privilege to meet almost all the PMO directors of the winners and finalists for the past four years (the leader of the Australian Securities Exchange PMO, a 2009 finalist, has been just about the only one who couldn’t make it). While this may be a very subjective assessment, it’s striking that, in retrospect, they were all charming and personable people … “attractive” not necessarily in the sense of appearance , but in the sense that you wanted to spend more time talking with them, and that their enthusiasm for their work was contagious. At the same time, it was obvious that they were the kind of leaders who constantly say: “I couldn’t have done it without (my team, the project managers, my executive leadership, my spouse).”

Several years ago, Dr. Frank Toney noted that humility was a characteristic of the best leaders; the PMO of the Year award-winning PMO Directors seem to bear this out.

It’s worth noting, as well, that winning PMOs have primarily been staffed PMOs: they follow the trend identified in the research of centralizing project management roles in an organizational home within the PMO. And they have been intimately involved in helping their staffs succeed: providing training and other career development opportunities. Some of the top PMOs even have staked their success on developing their human capital; the case of American Power Conversion, a 2006 finalist, comes to mind: they meticulously baselined their project outcomes by whether the leading PM was PMI-certified or not, and then followed the trend of results as they pushed to certify all the project managers under their umbrella. The results were astounding: take a look at the graph of PMP-led projects vs. non-PMP-led at the link above.

All this makes sense, of course because, in the end. a PMO is just people. Trained and qualified people led by a director they have trust in … are winners every time.

This just in: Our partner in presenting the PMO of the Year award this year is the PMO SIG of PMI. They’ve got a new blog all about PMOs: check it out here.

Alas, I am old enough to remember when there was some confusion about programs, portfolios, and multi-project management, a fog which has at least partly cleared thanks to the Project Management Institute’s continuing work on standardizing the terminology and developing standards for the various roles related to “management by projects” (or the organizational elevation of project management). However, it is interesting to see the welter of definitions for a program that are out there, for example in the PM Glossary compiled by Max Wideman. One gets the impression that a program is whatever an individual company says it is; and the program manager role description is a moving target. When we developed the role descriptions in our book, we looked at hundreds of actual job descriptions. Here’s part of what we included on the Program Manager:

Role Overview

In large organizations with many project managers, project managers may be awarded “grades” based on their span of control. This position manages complex, strategic projects that span organizational boundaries, so Program Managers should have experience managing multiple high-risk projects, including projects involving external vendors and multiple business areas. This grade is a logical training ground for Manager of Project Managers, Manager of Project Support, Strategic Project Office Director, and CPO positions for the program manager with business acumen. When groups of related projects are organized into programs, this position may manage multiple project managers whose projects provide specific deliverables; all which must be collectively managed to provide the desired programmatic results.

Whew. As I read that I am reminded of the Cat in the Hat, who boasted he could “fan with my tail while I hop on a ball/ and that is not all! …” But seriously, as we have seen the PMO grow in stature and span of influence, those with program management skills have increasingly been in demand. They have the skills, honed in the coordination of many conflicting priorities, issues, and personalities, to assist a PMO Director in pursuing multiple objectives, each with its project or fleet of projects. It’s a natural training ground for the Portfolio Manager … and may even be the Portfolio Manager in all but name.

Here’s a great article about the Program Manager role by one of our PMO of the Year judges.

And, speaking of the PMO of the Year; check back here on March 2 for an announcement of this year’s application process, and links to the contest materials.

In 2003, when I began researching PMO roles for our books, Optimizing Human Capital and Project Management Roles and Responsibilities, I proposed adding a role called “Manager of Project Managers” to our list, and was met with some skepticism, and rightly so. At that time, there was little evidence that project personnel were being managed and supervised within project offices: the matrix organization ruled.

Nevertheless, because we hoped that the book would be prescriptive - a force for change - rather than merely descriptive of present circumstances, this role (along with others that were rare at that time) was included. Whether it was because we correctly fingered the pulse of the industry … or because companies took our advice … by 2007 when we did our State of the PMO research, the majority of enterprise-level PMOs were actively managing a stable of project managers, plus a wide array of specialist positions, within the PMO.

What do I mean by “managing”? - well, pretty much everything that HR used to do: hiring, training, performance reviews, mentoring, and providing oversight. In addition, the PMO Resource Manager (the most common take on this title among our clients today) also stays close to the Project Portfolio Management process, assisting the PMO Director and/or Portfolio Manager in allocating and levelling resources to optimize the organization’s strategic portfolio.

Does your organization have a PMO Resource Manager? Share insights about the role with us, and we’ll be sure to include them in the next edition of our Roles & Responsibilities book.

Next week in our review of PMO roles: The Program Manager.

Seven years ago, when we began the research behind our book Optimizing Human Capital with a Strategic Project Office, we had numerous discussions about the roles we proposed within the strategic, enterprise PMO. Have you ever met a Chief Project Officer? someone asked skeptically. Does the role of Project Portfolio Manager even exist? Is there really such a thing as a PMO Resource Manager or HR Liaison?

At the time, although all those role descriptions were based on real instances, their existence was admittedly marginal. Yet, by the time the book came out two years later, people at PM conferences were presenting us with business cards inscribed with those very titles, and some even more daring. (Vice President for Strategic Program Management? PMO Methodology Guru?) And, by 2007, a CPO was winning one of PMI’s highest honors (see the “Person of the Year” writeup here).

Today, the vision of the enterprise, strategic PMO has become a reality, and this structure continues to morph. What’s next? Forrester has termed it the Next-Generation PMO; we’ve gone so far as to call it the Strategy Execution Office. Either way, the array of specialized and executive positions in the PMO is going to continue to proliferate. From 2005, when we proposed the roles and responsibilities in the PMO as an appendix to the Optimizing Human Capital book, to 2008 when we published the State of the PMO research, an astounding growth in the numbers and descriptions of roles managed within the PMO had taken place - over 600% growth in some roles such as Relationship Manager!

So, for my next series of blogs, I’m going to focus on key roles in the PMO. Next up: the Resource Manager. Meanwhile: what’s the most interesting title you’ve come across in project management recently?

Around here, we believe in baselining … otherwise, you can’t tell if you are making any progress. The start of a new year seems an appropriate time to look around at the business environment, as well as our internal organizational environment, and make a few resolutions based on a clear-eyed view of present circumstances.

Looking up economic data for a project I’m working on, I came across Moody’s Business Confidence Index. Wow! Love that steep and continuing climb: it bodes well for ventures of all sorts and sizes. Yet even the most confident of the business leaders surveyed were not rushing out to make large investments in inventory or facilities; instead, their immediate plans primarily focused on process improvement.

This is an approach that makes sense to anyone that has ever managed anything, including a home or a garden. During the last recession, when homeowners quit spending money on vacations and new cars, a new word - cocooning - entered the lexicon. Instead of running off to Aruba, they put in a patio, added a little fountain, put up bird feeders … and discovered the beauty of their existing assets and resources. A recent column in the New York Times (Doing More, Spending Less) indicates that the same trend is resurfacing now.

On an organizational level, if we “do more, spend less” that translates to process improvement. And what process is most likely to yield organizational performance improvement? A decade of research carried out under the auspices of PM Solutions tells us that, across the board, improvements in project management processes also correlate to improvements in an array of organizational performance metrics, from the financial bottom line to the qualitative bottom line of customer and employee satisfaction.

No matter where you turn your gaze in the organizational household - aligning the portfolio with strategic vision, improving the portfolio management process, training staff in project management, implementing processes to turn around (or turn off) troubled projects, or improving resource management - you will see an area that, tweaked and polished, results in money saved, morale boosted, or customer confidence improved.

In Italy, it’s traditional to clean out closets and cupboards on the first of a new year, and get rid of all the unused stuff that’s weighing you down - Arrividerci to all that junk! Let’s not forget that the very word “economy” comes from the Greek for “household.” January 2010 seems the ideal moment to take a good look around you (that is, assess and baseline) at how your household is running. Then start cleaning those organizational closets! Tucked behind the inefficiencies and outdated assumptions, you may just find a forgotten treasure.

[For some thoughts on how the PMO can be instrumental in this improvement, see our new Solutions Brief: "Recession? Bah, Humbug!"]

On Thursday, at the PMI conference in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the conference organizers featured a track of simultaneously translated presentations in English (adding additional complexity to their conference planning … and pulling it off beautifully, too). The keynote was Greg Balestero, CEO of the Project Management Institute. He spoke on the theme of project management in times of economic stress, and one statistic - to which he kept returning several times during the presentation - seemed particularly significant.

According to research by PMI, there are somewhere between 16 million and 20 million people around the world working on projects. (My personal bias is that it’s probably many more than that, but they don’t realize they are doing projects!) In contrast, there are only about 400,000 people holding project management certifications of various brands.

Whoa. That’s a lot of room for seat-of-the-pants, PM-by-accident, lucky (or unlucky) breaks on projects. Conversely, that’s a lot of room for improvement.

Of course, there’s an argument to be made that holding a certification doesn’t automatically make you a better project manager. But knowledge of the basics is so powerful that providing training - whether or not the recipients go on to achieve certification - is a must for companies that hope to sail through this particular economic stress. That’s doubtless why the companies doing the most training also report better organizational performance on a diverse scoreboard of measures, according to our 2009 PM Value study.

Whether you call it The Vanishing Mass Market (as Business Week has done), or The Long Tail, (as Wired blogger Chris Anderson terms it) or Nouveau Niche, it’s obvious that the way we interact with the marketplace has changed. Consumers want what they want, not some lowest-common-denominator, one-size-fits-all product. That’s why we have 100 specialized channels of cable TV instead of three networks.

On the organizational level, we’ve seen that companies are less interested in generic PM training, and more drawn to training solutions that are tailored to one industry, one company, one culture: theirs.

Now, it’s long been a matter of pride with project management experts that PM itself is a generalist. Project managers are fond of boasting, “have PMP will travel.” that their skills apply just as easily to an IT project as to construction or a lunar landing. That may be true–certainly the basic techniques of PM are industry-agnostic–but if I were a CEO I’d want to be sure the lessons I was paying for were lessons immediately applicable to my business. Wouldn’t you?

That’s why — and here’s another prediction — project management training will become less oriented to PMP self-study courses, and more “nouveau niche”: customized to industry and even to individual organization. Hats off to the curriculum developers (this one’s for you, Helene!): they will make all the difference. They make training solutions more nimble, more responsive … even, you might say, agile.

Continuing to crunch through the raw data from our Value of Project Management statistics, a coincidence struck me: across the board, the top-performing companies are training more intensively, and doing more training in non-technical subjects, than are the companies whose performance data falls in the lowest quartile in the study.

This jives with Frank Toney’s observation, in one of the first books we published, that as a project manager moves up the ladder organizationally, he or she relies less on technical skills and more and more heavily on facilitative and business skills. (The very skills our PM College’s new mastery-level “people skills” courses are designed to instill.)

It also reflects the reality, uncovered in our State of the PMO research, that PMOs are moving up the organization to the enterprise level, by the hundreds, and taking on new and expanded roles as they gain esteem and responsibility. One of those roles involves the professional development of project managers and other project resources. The top performers in the Value study do the majority of their training on site, providing project management development that dovetails with their industry, organizational culture, and business objectives … and which focuses on advanced topics rather than on the nuts and bolts.

Here’s a prediction: in our next round of research, we’ll see even more enterprise-level PMOs, and even more PMO-based professional development. After all, who knows better than the PMO staff how to train project resources?

I wrote that last post on my personal computer where I don’t have all the work-related bookmarks stored, so I wanted to come back and add a few links to good articles and information about how successful companies are using collaborative tools to manage people and projects.

From AMR Research, this article grandly titled The Future of Work examines some of the tools out there - and be sure to click on the link where he muses on the difference between MS Office apps and the tools he really needs! (As a recent adopter of Office 07, I can feel his pain.)

On the nuts and bolts end of the spectrum, check out Using Twitter to Track Tasks and Time in Project Server 2007.

I’ll be posting more links on this topic from time to time. Meanwhile: How are you using Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, or a blog to improve your professional cred or keep up with tasks and / or colleagues? And if not … when?