The Overbearing Weight of Massive Process

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

Link to overview here.

If you have been following our series so far, we have covered a few different issues that hopefully you either don’t have or have resolved.  At this point in the journey, we have tackled ensuring you and your business lines have a clear idea of what value your PMO brings, you are actively mentoring, and you have a process oversight method in place.  Now we tackle evaluating your current process to ensure what you are doing brings value to your team, and your organization. 

How it happens 

In our PMO experience processes are frequently added and rarely subtracted. Every good idea in project management comes with an attached process or artifact that gets added to our day. Rarely do we get a forum to review and decide to remove things that have been implemented. Often when we question the value of a process the answer is along the lines of “Well, our CXO really likes this one report in this format, we need to keep doing it, even though it's a duplicate of the information in this other report."  Without active management this sort of process and artifact growth can get out of hand after a few years. 

One of the common issues we wrote about in our introductory post to this series was “An overabundance of process/artifacts”. This issue leads to project managers being buried under the weight of the processes required by their PMO. Once this happens, depending on how consistent the process oversight of the PMO is, you end with a couple problems: 

1. If you have consistent process oversight - Your PMs are unable to scale their support. If each project comes with 10hr/wk+ of process and artifact overhead (before any of the actual project management work happens) your PMs are limited to handling 2-3 projects at any given time.

2. If you don’t have consistent process oversight - Your PMs will just not adhere to your processes, creating an inconsistent experience for your stakeholder teams.  This can be corrected ad hoc but our best results have come from getting a solid oversight framework in place first. 

What we recommend 

When we have worked with PMOs on building or modifying their process approach the greatest success we have is starting with a greenfield exercise at the leadership level. 

1. What do you want your PMO and project managers to do for your organization?

2. What are the problems you need to solve today?

3. What is the optimal way to communicate with you? 

Simple enough to say, we know it is tougher to get the right people engaged to participate, much less come to an agreement. 

Once we understand the end goals and immediate problems we start to prioritize. There are a many tools we use to prioritize problems and map out your solutions. What really matters is getting to the end of the exercise with an understanding of what you need now, what you need soon, what you would like later, and importantly, what you can eliminate. 

Once you have that process/deliverable prioritization mapped out there are a few key points of evaluation: 

• Is this goal already met by an existing process or deliverable?

• If so, does that deliverable need to be enhanced, meet the goal, or is it more than the goal calls for? 

• If the current process meets the goal, great, you can mark that one as done and move on. 

• If the goal is not met by existing process or if the process needs to be enhanced, what is the level of effort to do that? 

• If the process is more than needed for the goal, can we simplify the process? 

Next, we map that prioritization out into an incremental approach to implement PMO process (which leads to artifacts). Our goal is to build a plan that emphasizes focusing on one to three new concepts at a time. 

1. Implement the new thing

2. Do the thing consistently for a defined period (turn it into an organizational habit)

3. Repeat step 1.

Putting it all together

An example of this is the simple phased approach we recommend for “first” project managers.  These are the first project managers in an organization that are hired to manage projects with no existing structures in place.  Our phased approach tackles the tactical project management work first and then transitions to the portfolio level. 

 Phase 1 – Ensuring your project teams clearly know what they need to do

• Action Item, Issue, and Decision tracking 

• Basic regular team status calls to review these things 

Phase 2 – Enhanced planning and communications 

• Implement status reports 

• Building project plans 

Phase 3 – Basic PM Maturity 

• Project kickoff meetings 

• Project communications plans 

• Risk tracking and management 

• Defined project closure process 

Phase 4 – Portfolio Management – A focus on building a strategic process to prioritize new projects 

• Initiative evaluation

• Initiative prioritization 

• Project approval process (Charters) 

The goal is to take on each of these phases as a defined unit of work and practice.  We recommend spending at least 60 days in each or the first two phases to build the habits and knowledge needed to be able to execute them consistently and efficiently. 

Hopefully this illustrates the iterative approach we have seen work well.  In your case a given phase may be implementing two process enhancements and eliminating some unnecessary work you found in the evaluation.  The key is just to keep the total number of changes small enough that your team can successfully build new habits quickly.