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.

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.

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?

Everyone is writing about how business can thrive in spite of the downturn … including me. We’re working on a new white paper on the ways that project management discipline can help companies contain costs and become more efficient. (You’ll be able to read it here on or before August 13). But something about the whole idea made me antsy, because merely cutting and thinning and pruning isn’t enough. You’ve got to add the sunshine and fertilizer, too.

And, in fact, research into the ways strong companies have survived previous economic upsets, shows that, indeed “You can’t shrink your way to greatness.”

I was reminded that great Tom Peters quote from Circle of Innovation many times this spring as I watched the unemployment figures rise.

So I went looking for other evidence that greater success - or at the very least, a more sustainable form of success - is created when companies both prune judiciously and invest creatively in their own future.

And I found it.

It’s pretty extensive research, so explore the link yourself, but just to give a precis, companies that flourished coming out of a recession in the early 90s:

• They cut the RIGHT costs .. and did not engage in self-defeating cost-cutting.
• They leveraged their IT systems to gain insight into the business
• They collaborated with stakeholders … instead of pursuing projects/products dreamed up in a vacuum
• They killed or refused the RIGHT projects and opportunities … also based on insight into their own finances, markets, capacity, and so on.
• Rather than merely shrinking - via cost and headcount cuts - they invested in innovative products and processes.

This is one of those articles that never mentions project, program, or portfolio management. You wouldn’t find it if you searched under those terms. Yet, take another look at that list … are we not talking project and portfolio management here?

More rants on why PM/PPM can not just save, but grow, your business … coming soon.

Our PMO Award winner and finalists had their day in the sun in Boston, and the brief case studies of their achievements have been posted on the PM Solutions website, for those of you who weren’t able to be with us at the awards ceremony.

It’s an interesting thing about these case studies; this is the fourth year we have sponsored this award, and each year I’ve pulled together a story from the application materials, checked with the PMO Director, and gone straight to press with it … oh, but how things have changed in 2009!

This year each of the case studies went though more than one level of review at the PMOs’ companies - from legal to PR, and up the chain to VPs of various stripes, our humble few pages of copy were vetted, critiqued, corrected and revised. At first this just frustrated me, but then I realized: for the first time in the award’s history, the upper echelons actually care what is being said about the PMO.

And that, my friends, is progress.

Yet … weigh in here, project managers … although PMs have for decades said they wanted greater visibility in the organization and more executive involvement … now that this is a reality in many companies, I’d bet that visibility is a two-edged sword. Yes, you get the praise and maybe even the funding you deserve. But the presentation of Paul Ritchie’s quoted in yesterday’s post from Kent Crawford tells another side of the story: visibility also means being held accountable for our lapses, and scrutinized on factors we perhaps had not even thought of.

I’ll be interested to hear from those of you who find themselves visible … and nervous … as well as those who are basking in the spotlight.

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.

… but I seem to be facing the New Year - and the news cycle - with a sense of unreasonable optimism. Partly this is because I’ve been paging through all my favorite business and projects news sources deciding what to put in our blogroll (check it out in the right-hand column!) There are some really smart people writing about what’s just ahead for projects in the current economic situation, and they can’t all be wrong. The guardedly expressed good news falls under three general headings:

1. “Project Management Eats Economic Downturn for Breakfast.”

2.  “Innovation Eats Recession for Breakfast.”

3. “Green/Alternative Economy Fixes Breakfast for the Planet. Chai, Anyone?”

There’s also, of course, a healthy serving of gloom and doom. Most of it, though, reminds me of something my father once said. Born in 1911, he was one of the last of the hot-type typographers - a craft with tools and methods pretty much unchanged for 400 years. When the little specialty shop where he plied his antique trade finally closed, and he had to learn computer typesetting (in his sixties), he hated it. But, as a game survivor of two World Wars and the Great Depression, he told me philosophically, “when the automobile came along, the wheelwrights and harness makers had to learn something new or go out of business. That’s life.”

Indeed. That said, life can be pretty rough on us when we refuse to recognize which of our self-defeating behaviors need changing. It’s tempting to believe that, because “business as usual” allowed us to have several decades of world-beating economic success, that the way we do business is the right way … the only way.

Project management has been somewhat of a corporate underdog for most of its history. One of the themes that I often heard among attendees at PMI conferences or our own Benchmarking Forums was, “We can’t get the C-level to listen to us!” That’s been changing in the last five years, as more and more companies implement PMOs at the enterprise level, and apply project portfolio management discipline as a tool for strategic execution. That’s why the present global economic situation - what Steve Forbes recently termed “a perfect storm” of conditions affecting nearly all sectors of the economy in nearly every nation - offers those skilled in practicing the discipline and mindset of “managing by projects” a unique opportunity. Project leaders are poised to have the ear of executives, thanks to their tireless trudge up from the trenches - but also are still somewhat “outsiders,” with views just different enough to offer the kind of systemic change companies need. It’s a shame that we had to reach near-collapse before the wisdom of project leaders could get a full hearing at the highest levels of business but - as one wise man said - “that’s life.”

[NB to my Faithful Readers: Wednesday's post that was truncated has been corrected! If you missed the last couple paragraphs, they are up there now. Technical difficulties ... !]

In yesterday’s post, I alluded to headlines in the business and technical press that made me feel there’s a dawn simmering somewhere on the other side of this doom and gloom economy. Here’s a sampling:

IT Remains a Bright Spot in Gloomy Jobs Numbers according to Ed Cone of CIO Insight.

Not that IT is the last word in project management - there are plenty of non-IT applications of the discipline that also provide opportunities to streamline, cut costs, and avoid rework - but the Ten Upsides to the Down Economy discussed in Eric Lundquist’s eWeek blog display quite a few opportunities for project management (and project managers).

Small and Midsize Businesses Continue Hiring says this eWeek column, noting that despite the economy, small business owners feel optimistic overall. Since, historically, these are the businesses that create the most jobs, and where innovations are born, this is good news. The brontosaurs of the business world are operations-heavy, while smaller, newer businesses race from project to project.

Other articles view U.S. economic challenges from an outside perspective. For example, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, interviewed on the Knowledge@Wharton site, remains bullish because he takes history into account, and because of his “outsider” perspective (as a Turkish-American educated in Britain):

[M]any Americans, under siege in the 1970s and 1980s from rising gas prices and economic competition from Japan, thought the economy was falling apart back then as well. “But the system did not collapse,” he noted. “America came out of that crisis so much stronger because … this country and this nation did what it always does best — reinvent itself and innovate.”

More about some of the more innovative projects and products in the news in our next post. Stay tuned.