Who Plan and Deliver the PMO / EPMO ?

Most organizations plan and implement their strategic initiatives all the time. However, delivering it faces difficulties and even failure. One of the important initiatives for government, developers and contractors is the PMO implementation Initiative which is a restructuring initiative which make it more difficult to plan and implement.

The good news I read in the recent PMI Pulse of The Profession 2017 report, is that:

”

1. We have learned in the past: that when proven project, program, and portfolio management practices are implemented, projects are more successful.
2. Developing the technical, leadership, and business management skills of project professionals continues to receive significant attention. Thirty-two percent of survey respondents consider both technical and leadership skills a high priority, a 3 percent increase over last year�.”

The above two points put more pressure for all project based organisations to work in a portfolio management system and stop working in the projects silos and independent project account or in another words to work on EPMO / PMO models.

Back to the challenge of implementing a successful PMO which is still strong like any other initiative because mainly the lack of talents of PM professionals with business orientation to plan / implement and manage day to day activities of the EPMO.

From my experience, the implementation which depends on internal resources more than external party is more successful. The plan and implementation should be done by the staff who own and deliver the projects on the ground. The IT consultant / business consultant will not know what’s the best solution for the organization. The staff owns the processes and they know where to correct and what’s needed. They need only the tools and management commitment and leadership. Especially when we all know that implementation process should not be less than 6 months to 12 months and links all departments together in the end. This way of implementation usually faces the challenge of operation disruption which according to the PMI Pulse is still challenging “C-suite continues to be largely focused on bridging strategy formulation and execution and tackling technology and business disruption”.

Moving the thinking form PMO to Strategic EPMO raises the need to link pre-contract stage with post contract stage in the portfolio high level to really show how the strategic EPMO is achieving the business strategic goals. However, Do the organisations have inhouse skills to merge business thinking within delivery and operation. Eighty percent said in the PMI Pulse report that it is a high priority “Developing talent with the necessary business skills for the management of projects”. It is a resilient challenge to get project management teams think how to be business oriented through all project delivery processes. As Jeff Zircher, Manager, Global Program Management, Caterpillar Inc. mentioned the need to “focus on strengthening his organizations project management talent pipeline, with a goal to improve recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and development. He calls it starting at the foundation� because he wants to get the right people with the right skills and capability well-positioned right from the start.”In their case they have the business but they don’t have enough PM professionals.

This missing link is still a challenge for most organization because the limited skills in the market which force the leaders to depend on the external parties to help them to cover these gaps which return us to square zero.

Similarly, trying to cover the gaps off between the planning and implementation, the Economist Intelligence Unit sponsored by the Brightline Initiative released a special survey study report (released on 3rd Oct 2017) titled Closing the Gap: Designing and Delivering a Strategy that Works to study mainly how to design, plan and implement successful organization initiatives and how to deliver it successfully.

The survey result analysis report was a result of a total of 500 senior executives participated in the survey, conducted in June and July 2017. Respondents all work for large companies: 48% have annual global revenues of $1 billion to $5 billion; 39% of $5 billion to $10 billion; and the remaining 13% of more than $10 billion plus 13 corporate leaders and academic experts.The main outcome of the report which match the discussion above is:

1. Most companies struggle to bridge the gap. 59% of survey respondents admit that their organizations often struggle to bridge the gap between strategy development and its practical, day-to-day implementation.
2. On average, organizations fail to meet 20% of their strategic objectives because of poor implementation.
3. More than half (53%) say that their weakness in delivering their strategy puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

The above three points are matching PMO implementation challenges in a way or another. So what’s the problem?

The PMO implementation is always an IT Technology based solution. Any big jump from the organization from their system to the new system creates a new business model completely. Here it comes the challenges and resistance.

The PMO solution should be planned and tailored around the current systems. If the organization for example, is not applying PM best practices at start, jumping to PMO is a big jump for them. We expect to apply PMO for organizations with PM best practices applied with its processes and tools including PM software. This is if we are using the current staff.

If we are applying a new PMO with totally new staff or at least (50% new professionals on PM best practices and its tools) then yes, we can jump and teach the other 50% the required skills.

Again, we refer to the need that PMO should be planned and implemented over 6 to 12 months by the teams who deliver the projects with some help from external consultants only. Implementing the PMO by external consultants with surveys and high-level engagement only is one reason for failure because the complicated communication model. This point was emphasized by Mr. Hilton Romanski, CSO of Cisco, a US-headquartered multinational technology company, who said “A lot of mature companies have business models that have been optimized for a certain set of circumstances, he explains. But when circumstances change, the business model must shift as well. The resulting strategy might require new incentive structures, different people, and even finding out if “there is a new operating model you can get your arms around, Mr. Romanski says. Efforts to deliver so much, almost simultaneously, can falter for any number of the reasons listed in Exhibit 1 (the initiatives implementation obstacles found in the report).”

Let’s see closely the solutions provided by the participants of the Economist Intelligence Unit report (Oct 2017); in the following picture from the report;

Most of the points above indicate internal factors which led to the failure for engagement and commitment through communication and coordinating. It indicates “there is a gap, if not a gulf, between the C-suite and operations. This disconnect can kill any hope of successful delivery.”

The EIU report found that “Two-thirds (65%) of the companies surveyed say that strategy falls short because of a failure to understand the company, its market environment and its ability to execute. At the same time, the single most-cited improvement that would make delivery more effective (24%) is co-ordinating those who design strategy and those who deliver it. Therefore “The Leaders are better at co-ordinating the two groups (the Design (strategic planning) and the Delivery)”.

The conclusion of the report goes strongly stating that “Strategy delivery and design are an interconnected continuum of activities, not distinct areas of disparate importance: Strategy should not be a two-step process, where one team creates a plan and another implements it with little interaction between the two. At Leaders, interaction between those implementing strategy and those responsible for designing it leads to an ongoing evolution of the strategy itself as well as to program delivery approaches that are most effective for putting it in practice. These interactions are among the key behaviors that Leaders should work to install across the organization as they build strategy delivery capabilities�”.

That is an important point I was educating about before in my articles and I think to have a successful PMO/EPMO implementation it should have the resources within to plan it and deliver it. The organisation can recruit new staff if needed to do it who should have a condition as part of their contract to teach and mentor a minimum of two existing staff in the organisation to do, think and execute their tasks accordingly after finishing their contract.

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Ziad Albasir

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