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.

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.

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.

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.

You may be aware that Google recently acquired Feedburner, the service we have used to maintain the Strategy & Projects blog mailing list and posting alerts. The transition has been rocky for us, and we have lost the ability to update our account information in Feedburner. (That’s why the alert you received about this post told you it was written by Jim Pennypacker.) Google has known about the issue (which affects many Feedburner accounts, not just ours) since Jan. 25 and hasn’t responded with a workaround yet. So, our only recourse is to create a new account. This means that we will lose our present subscriber database.

Sorry for the inconvenience; it’s yet another example of the pandemic of poor customer service (and, I might add, bad project management) that plagues business in our times. I’ve lost a lot of the respect I once had for Google through this debacle.

… 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.”

Over the past ten years, we’ve come to value the results of our Center for Business Practices action research events, the Strategy & Projects Summit and Project Management Benchmarking Forums. At these events, project management leaders from major organizations have met and exchanged advice, best practices, challenges and solutions. They’ve forged working relationships with the CBP and with their peers that have helped them to positively impact the project management culture in their own organizations. With this blog, we’re expanding these face-to-face events to a global discussion network.

For years, we’ve watched as project management has expanded in influence and clout. We’ve followed with excitement the upward trajectory of project management within organizations - and, we hope, offered research tools to lead the way. From a tactical, single-project focus to the IT project office … to the enterprise Center of Excellence, and on to the EPMO … from the project to the project portfolio … from project excellence to strategy execution … .

Today, when management gurus and CEOs discuss execution, they are talking project and program management: governance, portfolio selection and balancing, performance measurement, resource capacity and competence, and the IT infrastructure that makes interdisciplinary management of “strategic initiatives” (those things we’ve always called projects) possible.

It’s an exciting time for project professionals. Best practices are only now being worked out for the deployment of project management at the strategic level. We’re constantly identifying new practices and approaches, and look forward to sharing them with you and hearing your feedback. Sign up below to receive a heads-up when new content is posted here; or come back and visit often.

We’re looking forward to the conversation.

Onward and upward,

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin
Editor in Chief
PM Solutions