I'm working a proposal for a Program Management Office deployment in a government domain. While I've lead project portfolio management processes, the development of program offices, and the program management office itself, I come across two books that moved my understanding to a new level.
This book has a step by step set of process for standing up a Program Management Office. The idea of a PMO seems foreign to some, even undesirable in the presence of agile software development and the mythical agile project management.
But a PMO has one of several critical purposes in an enterprise organizations. This book and the next speak directly to those - which I'll summarize in a bit.
But first let me make a pitch that I've made in the past around the application of Agile Software Development. Agile as a set of practices has been shown to improve lots of things around "writing software for money." Not the least of which is the institutionalization of the incremental delivery approaches found in our aerospace and defense business.
In A&D Work Packages and the Tasks they contain have limited duration and most importantly measures of physical percent complete in units of measure meaningful to the decision makers. This last part is the Critical Success Factor for any project. The measures of progress using the passage of time and the consumption of resources is simply Bad Management.
As well without a mandated limit on the duration of the Work Packages, the natural tendency is to extend the length of work before there is a measurement of physical progress. Agile does this naturally. So does every Earned Value based program controls system for the simple reason that a formal report is due to the Government every 30 days.
The next book is about the integration of the Program Management Office with Project Portfolio Management. The critical success factor here is to move away from using the PMO and PPM for cost reduction and move toward throughput management.
The notion of cost containment is ill formed and counter to increasing business value. Throughput focuses on meeting organization goals. These goals should be defined in a strategy, which in turn should be defined in a Balanced Score Card style strategy document.
This is the way The Real Way is producing business value. Connect the Balanced Scorecard initiatives, with projects in the portfolio, then manage those projects using measures of physical percent complete.
In each book there is hands on advice for the deployment and application of Program Management Offices and Portfolio Management. This short blog cannot convey these processes or the importance of their application.
But here's a set of questions that must be answered for any organization to be successful in any project domain:
- What are the organization's strategy objectives?
- What projects are active today that support these strategic objectives?
- Can these projects be directly traced to an objective?
- What projects must be completed to achieve each of these strategic objectives?
- Can you measure the performance of each project?
- Is there a mechanism for moving each project forward more rapidly?
