How Old Are You In The PPMO Maturity?

How old are you in the PPMO maturity? 

Adopting PPMO means trying to use best practices in project management delivery. Therefore, the mindset is mainly concentrating on project management (PM) methodology and its application in the organization as a portfolio.

These led the team to focus on PM processes more. This goal and its time management impact the portfolio overall outcomes analysis and the right decision-making study during project portfolio processes implementation.

The concentration here is more on one goal of the PPMO which is to govern the project management processes and to provide training for it which involves the PPMO management more in the day to day PM delivery processes and less in the overall PPM analysis.

This trap happened most of the time when the maturity of the Project Based Organization (PBO) is still far from applying the best PPMO practices. In this case, burning stages to have full project portfolio management office system working with high, sophisticated, scientific analysis and outcomes for decision making in the first three years is a plan to fail. Simply because the outcome is based on low quality project management delivery processes.

Let’s highlight the main differences between project management and project portfolio management. PPM is concentrating on achieving the business performance outcomes while project management is project output oriented. PM responsible to deliver the scope within budget, time and quality, while PPM is responsible to deliver the business goals by doing the right project on the right time with flexibility on resources and budget allocation.

For example, in government works, we have scenarios where we have to deliver certain projects before another for urgent needs (like disaster scenario, community needs or political decisions). Here, we allocate the budget according to it even if it means we will delay some planned and ongoing projects and the delay also means over budget too.

Similarly, in the private sector, for a product developer for example, when there is a competitor challenge to deliver a similar product ahead of their product, they might take a decision to increase the budget to get more resources or to reduce the scope, so they can release the product to the market before the competitor. There are many scenarios where we know that PPMO prioritizing is changing every month if not every week for shared resources and budget allocation in a busy projects’ delivery firm using agile approach.

What is the organization maturity to deliver PPMO capabilities?

The maturity starts with many PBO working on project delivery with “support and control” from the corporate project controls department and quality assurance department mainly and other departments in the organization in general. Let’s call this stage the crawling maturity of PPMO. It is a must stage before starting some sort of walking PPMO. This stage has simple excel sheets and simple reporting and no enough staff with project management best practices knowledge neither unified PM methodology and written approved processes.

The second maturity level is when PBO adopting one or more PM methodologies to train and apply to its project delivery processes within the same above mixed project/functional department structure. Let’s call this step the PPMO first steps baby.  The baby here falls many times before learning how to walk. So take it easy on this stage and give all support and means to help the PPMO takes its first steps. Remove all obstacles (challenges) to allow safe walking. This stage starts building a dedicated system for PPMO and sample dashboards and reports with no data scientific collection and analysis yet.

The third level, the semi-independent PPMO. Let’s call it the PPMO teenage stage. Here, they learnt form the above stages, that the authority structure needs to be changed. The PPMO can manage now the business needs without the departments.  Some of the department’s responsibilities are transferred to the PPMO like project controls, direct hiring, some level of finance authority and many others depends on the organization policies, willing and capability to change. Although, the reviews are more regular by the finance department and the top management based on the developed governance. In this stage, the system is still under testing, and the issues are determined to be fixed. Good dashboards are developed and data scientific collection and analysis are still developing its methods.

The fourth level of maturity is the PPMO is in the manhood stage where business process management is integrated with PPM processes in one approved working system. Here the governance set up the roles and obligations clearly. The accountability is in the edge for the PPMO team. Project optimization is working fine. Some processes are automated, and dashboards provide good quality recommendations. Data analysis methods are approved working well. However, the emotional maturity, individual behavior, risk capability and uncertainty analysis are always a challenge in many cases.

The final level of maturity is the superior stage when most processes (especially the data collections and analysis are automated). Artificial intelligence is playing main rule in project prioritizing and selections, customer interfaces, data collections, data analysis and decision making with minimum human interface. This stage is the immortal stage. You never age. You are always strong and capable of delivering all business needs. You change according to the data input and data forecasting and projection on large scale. IoT systems are feeding live to the PPMO system to take decisions accordingly. AI becomes the brain of the PPMO. Project delivery in most of its processes are automated and human interaction with the system is limited.

So How old are you in the PPMO maturity? 

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