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.

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!"]

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.

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?

Just as I completed my last post, a colleague sent me an article with the very timely title “Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Things that Never Happen” - which was my argument for why PMOs often succeed themselves out of business.

The article, from 2001, focuses on quality management initiatives, but it isn’t hard to read between the lines and see how project management initiatives are subject to the same forces. That process improvements often improve themselves out of existence, leaving the organization less well off than hoped, the authors term “the improvement paradox.”

And yet, when the authors note that the failure of organizations to profit over time from process improvements isn’t traceable to just one factor, but to “the interaction of tools, equipment, workers and managers,” the project management cheerleader in me can’t help but note that the integration of all these factors would be simpler in a company with a solid PM culture … the kind of culture you build through having a mature enterprise PMO in place.

Okay, now for the news: You may have noticed that the link to our PMO research report no longer goes to the CBP bookstore. That’s because my sidekick of nearly 15 years, Jim Pennypacker, has gone off to start his own publishing firm and all the Center for Business Practices content has been moved under the PM Solutions flag. Our books are still available through Amazon.com; research summaries are posted here. Please reset your bookmarks for our research content to these urls, and join me in wishing all the best to Jim in his new venture.

I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote address at the CBP Summit this year, on the subject of PMO Governance. And, because the topic of governance always touches on areas in organizations where our assumptions rule … where things that “can’t” be questioned (but should be) take up residence … I thought I’d kick it off with a little exercise to show my audience how we can all suffer from “perceptual blindness” - the failure to see things that are right under our noses - simply because we are focused elsewhere.

I won’t go into this too much so as not to spoil the effect, but take at look at the video on this site. Tip: Notice how many times the white shirts pass the ball and see if you can detect any gender bias.

Gotcha? Well, the same thing happens in organizations. We are sure we “know” things about our processes that in fact may not be true. For example, it isn’t uncommon to hear of highly successful PMOs that are disbanded. Another speaker, Paul Ritchie of SAP (check out his Crossderry Blog in our Blogroll) addressed this in his Summit presentation. He mentioned the wake-up call he received when he realized that others did not view his “successful” PMO in the same light he did, and the self-examination he went through to address his own blind spots.

When developing a governance structure - for the PMO or an entire organization - it’s critical to have a clear view of organizational structures, politics, and status. Devising the rules that govern what’s in and what’s out of a portfolio of project investments can’t be based of false assumptions about value, markets, resources, or strategies. That’s why some of the top research firms - Gartner, for example - have recommended bringing in outside voices to address similar organizational change issues. When assessing the organizational playbook, it helps to have a little perspective on the game.

Eavesdropping on the attendees at the CBP Summit here in sunny Cambridge, Mass yielded the following gems:

“Project management is like a ‘black art’ to the executives … no one understands how it works. They kind of want it but are scared of it at the same time.”

“This merger is a little different, because they are keeping the team intact…”

“I worked in the space program, but never built a rocket; worked in the computer industry but never designed a chip … project management is transferable. It’s like Jack Welch said: he never made a lightbulb at GE but he was a great CEO.”

“If I were naming PMI today, I think I’d name it something different. The People Management Institute. The Process Management Institute. The Performance Management Institute. The focus on the project makes us blind to the larger issues.”

“We’re looking for predictable outcomes … instead of the ‘project black hole’.”

“My company is back in the 80s. How do you fast-forward through project management into strategic management-by-projects?”

… It’s exciting - but also daunting - to hear the recipients of the PMO of the Year awards describe what they’ve done - and the speed with which some of the improvements were implemented. Stay tuned for some brief interviews with the Award winner and the finalists later today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have an answer for that last question: we are all ears.

The Center for Business Practices’ Strategy & Projects Summit is in full swing this morning, here in Cambridge Mass … I’m blogging with a view of the Charles River, which is a nice change. And, speaking of change: the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council’s here with us, listening to my CEO Kent Crawford do his presentation on the PMO - material drawn from our books on the topic.

I say, speaking of change, because last year at the Summit I chatted with a young man who worked for a Cambridge-based biotech firm and he had a familiar-sounding tale to tell: tasked with implementing portfolio management, he struggled to get his execs–doctors and scientists by training–to buy in to the process. As I recall, he said that they felt project management was both less of a rigorous “science” than they were used to dealing with, and more of a standardized approach than they liked to submit to–as people who were used to thinking of “academic freedom” in their approach to daily work.

What a difference a year makes!

Looking at the Mass Biotech website, we find not just our Ultimate PMO seminar being offered (and it is at capacity) but a meeting of the organization’s Project Management committee coming up within the month, addressing how biotech companies can implement sustainable practices. Here’s a quote:

Inherent in the concept of sustainability is the minimization of waste and reducing the use of natural resources to better match the rate at which they are replenished.

There’s a nice resonance between this balancing of resource use with resource availability … and the very same kind of resource balancing that PM practitioners are used to managing in terms of human resources. This may well be yet another area where the tenets of project management prove to be portable across industries, across sectors … and even across the divide of a changing global economy and climate.

Debbie’s comment regarding improved employee morale being an ancillary benefit of project management brings to mind a discussion I had with a client CIO last year who had been wondering about measuring the benefits of the project management and portfolio
management methodologies he had introduced into his organization. Naturally he was thinking about “hard numbers” such as projects completed on time and in budget.

This CIO had not yet thought about measuring the human benefits he was achieving: the sense of satisfaction the staff would receive from knowing they were working on projects that were important to the company, the sense of accomplishment associated with achievement of commitments they had made, the feeling of belonging to a team with a common objective. As someone who had been doing project-based work for the past 30 years, I knew that working with a good PM, reasonably applying PMBOK® Guide-aligned
processes, was a much more positive experience than working with a “shoot from the hip” PM.

When I shared my experiences with this CIO and we discussed measuring these indirect benefits, he realized that yes, perhaps there was something there to be surveyed and considered. And, no surprise, the results of his HR survey were aligned with Jeannette’s comments (in her post Agility Happens!) regarding employee satisfaction improvements.

Project management, when practiced right (just enough project management process, as indicated by the risk profile of the project) definitely has a positive impact on employee morale and turnover rates.

… how’s that for a bumper sticker? All kidding aside, my friend and colleague Karen White pinged me the other day to tell me to visit the CEO’s blog on the PMI website (it’s in our blogroll - check it out). As the author of the 2008 CBP book Agile Project Management, Karen was excited to see that the top echelon of PMI was beginning to “get” the transformative possibilities of agile methods. Says Karen: “IT IS HAPPENING!” - and she’s not the type to play fast and loose with exclamation points. Among other things, PMI CEO Balestero quoted an Agile guru as saying that the real impact of Agile methods was:

...driving such values as respect for everyone’s opinion and contribution to the project team, consistent and shared vigilance to risk, and more. He felt that it was developed not only to develop software faster and more effectively, but to provide a new culture of work, and new leadership values and principles.”

This is what excited Karen, and it hits me where I live, too. After years of writing from the fringe of project management (both fringes, actually–the one that says project management is a transformational tool for organizational change; and the one that says project management helps people feel engagement in work and enjoy their worklives more fully) - it’s gratifying that the inner circle of the profession can sense the important change that’s coming over the discipline.

Yes, project management is about control - about restoring order to the chaos. But it’s more than that; that’s  why it has been able to energize and compel so many people for so long. Newbies to the profession often remark on how passionate people can get about PM. CBP research has shown that merely implementing a basic methodology serves to improve employee morale.

Where order meets agility, work becomes exciting and things start to pop. The rapid spread of agile project management is just the firestarter our economy needs.