Simplifying Project Management - The Process Oversight Gap

This is the fourth article in our series on solving common PMO issues.

In our last article we wrote about the importance of mentoring to ensure your teams understand and have the skills to execute your PMO strategy.  How do you ensure that the actual delivery matches the strategy?  Regular oversight is the only way.

Less than half of our survey respondents stated that the PMOs they have worked for had a consistent methodology for overseeing process and deliverable consistency.

Process oversight is really just another way of saying quality control. If you were manufacturing widgets, you would have design specifications and control limits for building that product.  If your product is created outside of those control limits your customer is not going to accept delivery, or even worse, find out after the fact and just never do business with you again.  If you don’t have a specification, your employees would not know what to build.  You have to have both to achieve the outcome you want.

In the same vein, if you want to provide reliable value to your organization, they need to know what to expect.  Your PMO teams need to know what is expected from them.   Without these pillars in place, you may still see some success, but you will probably not see consistent success.  One of the keys to maturing your PMO team is to move away from individual heroics creating success to a team that delivers consistently.

In our survey less than 33% of the PMs that responded said their leadership took an active role in overseeing how they delivered projects and what they delivered as part of them.

We recognize in small PMOs leadership frequently does not have the simple mandate of “manage your project managers and maximize their benefit”.  Small PMO leaders are often managing projects along with other PMs.  They may be responsible for vendor management or another piece of the business along with the PMO.  In many cases there is no dedicated PMO leader, just a few project managers that report to a CIO/COO/Operations VP or something similar.

We believe there is still an opportunity and benefit to basic process level oversight, no matter how your PMO is structured.  Once you hit a consistent cadence oversight should take you less than an hour a week per project manager.

The benefits 

The primary benefit of regular process oversight goes hand in hand with the benefits of mentoring, ensuring consistent delivery.

Consistent delivery is what will drive your organizational value in a way that nothing else will. Individual heroics may get the occasional project done and create goodwill but over time reliability will win out.  If you want to be known as a high-value PMO your organization will need to know exactly what they can expect from your team and know that your team will deliver exactly that.  Once your team is functioning at a consistent level you will stop hearing the dreaded “I want PM X on my project not PM Z; I like how PM X manages things.”

The second benefit, believe it or not, will be more engaged project managers.

We fundamentally believe that most people want to be successful at work and want to feel like what they are doing matters to someone.  If you create an environment where your team knows exactly what you want as a leader and how you want it, it takes the uncertainty out of their work life.  They know if they deliver according to the standard you have set and trained them to, they have succeeded.  Your part of this contract is to be consistent as well; you can’t change your mind every week about how your team should be working.

The tertiary benefit is that you will get process feedback.  Your teams will tell you if something is not working.  Status reports that take 4hrs to create?  You will hear about that.  Even if you don’t get feedback directly from your team, you will see it in their delivery.  Are they failing to properly document and track risks?  It could be a skill or training issue; it could be they don’t see the value in doing that on the front line.  Either way, without some level of direct, consistent, oversight you would never know.

What we recommend

1. Start small.

2. Pick a process/artifact in use and decide that as a team (or solo PM) you are going to standardize the way that is updated and delivered.

3. Communicate this to your PMO team (obvious but important).

4. Use your mentoring time to determine if there are any skill or knowledge gaps at the individual level that would prevent your team members from delivering consistently.

5. Review your teams work on this process/artifact on a weekly basis

6. Provide any course corrections required.

7. Once you achieve consistent delivery for this process, move back to Step 2.

Why only do one process/artifact at a time?  Realistically we recommend 1-3 areas of focus simultaneously.  The goal is to turn the process into a habit so regular focus and oversight are key.  If you attempt to fix everything at the same time your odds of success are not going to be great.  It’s more pressure for your team, and more oversight time for you.

This type of oversight can be as simple as carving out the time on a weekly basis to review documentation.  As an example, if your current focus is on standardizing action and issue logs, it’s literally minutes of work every week to review those documents for a specific project and provide feedback.  Oversight does not have to be done in a 1:1, it just needs to happen consistently.

Process oversight, like mentoring, only happens when leaders focus on carving out the time to ensure it happens.   Like mentoring, we would like to challenge you to look at how you manage your teams and see if there is some benefit to focusing on process oversight in your organization.

If you have a great method of ensuring delivery consistency in your team we would love to hear about it, drop us a comment.