PMO Starts With P For People

People are the core for any initiative. That’s the fact we might forget sometimes. An important idea I am finding it everyday so important since I graduated and since I started reading about project management on 1994. After that when I got PMBOK 1996 first edition , I became so addicted to project methodologies and processes. If someone asked me to do something, I will ask “do you have a process”. If they do not, I create it for myself and I try to apply it. I was considering it the holy book for project management. Later on, I found many holy books, which might be more useful depends on projects type and the needs around the project.

After that in the professional life, I found that implementing of best project management practices in organizations faces challenges. Mostly, these challenges are coming first from people and second from current organization structure. So I started reading on change management, people management, organizations restructuring, decision making and many others.

The project management development knowledge continued to expand to program management and portfolio management until we are now in PMO and the future will bring more because , the problems are still there with little improvement. The future development of project management has to consider the market conditions and customize it to be per industry to fit their end products.

There are many types of PMOs, supportive, controlling, directive, enterprise level, business level, department level and many. This is the initial forms of PMOs, which is trying to solve the conflict of the market, industry and people setup with project management processes. The PMO different types are trying to tailor the project management methodologies and processes around the people and organization maturity by making the change more applicable to people and organizations.

Here, we come back to the basics, why we evolve the project management and portfolio management to the new trends the PMOs?

The sample answer is the above challenges, people resistant to change, organizations rigid structure and people on positions where they think, the PMO risks their authority and positions.

Restructuring organization is easy to justify when there are bad results, market conditions changes, future strategic planning, expansion, merging, and many other reasons. The issue is the people on management positions and their people under them. One method to solve these challenges is by changing people locations, departments, responsibilities, KPIs, and move people to be directly part of projects delivery as positions cycling in the organisation.

Having said that, this put a huge pressure on people. The most important aim to any change is better life for people happiness. If the change is against it, then we are planning to fail.

Here, it comes the real PMO leadership. Having the skills to understand people capability and organization maturity is crucial for success. Because of this, we have many types of PMOs and we can create more types if needed to help people adopt the goal of best practice on project management.

I have to highlight, that even in one organization, in the first stage of the PMO implementation, we should apply different PMOs levels and types based on people understanding, skills, capabilities and buy-in until we unify all. A central PMO in the first stage will be required to cover the skills and gaps by them until they learn it and do it by themselves.

People happiness should replace the mindset of people change. The aim for all leaders should be to deliver happy life for their people. Happy work environment, happy family environment. Some people might say, this might be applicable to public sector and not easy to apply in private sector. The reply to this is what we see these days about balance work/life and new work methods which applied by many companies. Beside what we see in the market slowness, which allows staff to have long holidays or short workdays. This new work methods can be included within PMO management and operation mythologies and processes to manage resources shifts (less than 8 hours a day, less than 5 days a week). Which will allow reducing unemployment and increase creativity and productivity.

PMO is not a methodology to utilize human resources to the maximum to deliver projects on time and budget with high quality by pressurizing the projects teams.

PMO is a methodology to utilize financial resources to the best use to deliver values and strategic goals (not only the business values, but also the environment and social values).

PMO is to ensure doing the right project on the right time using always the big picture. There is no isolated project. All projects in business and life are linked together and we should see the big picture to balance it for better life.

PMO starts with P for People. Change your mindset now.

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