Organizational Agility

It is hard to just get projects done, let alone worry about whether the business believes they will get the results they need. So the cycle continues; business distrust of IT and poor communication between senior leadership and the project office.

There is a ground breaking effort to target business management leaders with project management information of specific interest to them. A book is being pulled together on Organizational Project Management (OPM) that aims to create knowledge about the interfaces among projects, programs and portfolios, how projects benefit the ongoing operations in organizations and how strategic objectives are attained through projects.

What’s your opinion; does the industry need this book?

Do you have something to say about this topic? If so, see OPM for more details.

PMI is shutting down all SIGS and colleges and replacing them with virtual communities. They are also adding some, one of which is the Organizational PRoject Management VCP.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 31, 2008 has come and gone. OPM3 Second Edition has officially been released. The new OPM3 Fundamentals training is being rolled out through PMI. I just completed the beta course of the OPM3 Certified Consultant course, including taking the new entrance and certification exams, and found it very well done and a worthwhile effort. 

What is interesting is that I’m not seeing a lot of discussion about OPM3. I wrote about it a little on my blog. There is a pretty active OPM3 Sig on Linked In that everyone should join and participate in. I have seen a little from Lynda Bourne’s group about it. But not much else. What’s going on here? This is huge. We have the ability to dramatically improve the way organizations execute their strategy. Many of us have spent years on this effort. And yet,

chirp…chirp..

First, the OPM3 discussion on LinkedIn is great. There is valuable discussion within the OPM3 community there about the theory and use of OPM3. Everyone who is interested in improving the quality of the standard, the value of the certification, and their own knowledge should be participating in the OPM3 Linked In discussion. But we are talking to each other there. Linked In is not a marketing vehicle.

I have heard lots of complaints that the market is not familiar with OPM3. People say that Organization’s don’t understand the value and don’t see the benefits. I have talked to executives who are waiting for higher adoption because they don’t see enough about it.

Who are we waiting on to start these conversations? We need to start these conversations. Those of us who have invested years of our lives to this practice and the development of the standard need to start talking about it. PMI has case studies showing the benefits. I am aware of three major organizations that have used OPM3 as part of a larger improvement effort to great results. We just had a major release done, and with the new Portfolio, Program, and Project standards it is impressive.

We need to stop just talking to each other about this work, and starting conducting conversations where business executives can find it. The internet is an amazing thing, you can build brand and spread knowledge rapidly with limited effort. If you search for my name (Dennis Stevens) in Google I come up in 7 of the top 10 positions (I am not the gardner or the redefining craft guy). That’s just from writing on the Internet and in some business magazines.

Where are we talking about the standard that is searchable on the internet so an executive who comes in looking for OPM3 sees this as a real? Who is having meaningful successes and publishing them to business magazines and websites? We don’t need to sit around and wait for PMI to drive the marketing effort. Marketing today can be done by community. We need to be on Twitter, writing for business magazines, blogging, and commenting on other blogs about the value of project management in executing strategy and the way OPM3 helps you get there.

You can post here if you don’t have a blog. Drop me an email and I will get you set up. Let’s start to drive some content out where it can be seen and raise the awareness of the OPM3 standard and organizational project management maturity in general.  Please help grow OPM3.

To do list:

1. Join Linked In, Join the OPM3 SIG, and while you are at it send me a LinkedIn invitation.

2. If you are blogging about OPM3, let us know so we can add you to the blog roll here.

3. Drop us a note or add a comment to this post when you blog so I can publish a list of relevant blog entries for everyone to review.

4. When you see a great post or article or case study, let us know. We can do a digest of the OPM3 posts and create a hub for the people who help organizations improve their project management maturity.

5. Comment here on what else we can do to improve the visibility of OPM3 and other Organizational Project Management Maturity efforts.

Let’s start talking about OPM3!

We the PMs/DPMs of standards development got together at the Sofitel in Philly. Lots of PMi folks were there too, Greg Balistreros, MArk Langley, (PMI big shots), Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you brave enough (Foolish enough?) to volunteer to write questions for this exam, I got some very good answers from Nancy Wilkinson, about what we are trying to do with the entrance exam. Here Read the rest of this entry »

PMI held an OPM3 info session on Saturday, October 18, in Denver, and this time actually had some DATES for achievement of OPM3 marketing goals. Although, they seemed too far away for me. At least they had dates this time! IT was clear from the Focus Group held in Phildelphia, Sep. 15 2008, that users are very upset with the lack of movement by PMI to promote OPM3 in the market place. (A draft summary of the focus group findings is circulating now for acceptance by the focus group attendees - today is November 10, Hmmmmm.

The PMI conducted OPM3 users Forum was held Sunday, October 19 in Denver. Attendance was not as high as registrations showed. (I checked other sessions and found the same thing. I guess a lot of companies decided to save some money and cancel attendance, due to the world wide financial melt down.) Read the rest of this entry »

Overall, “maturity” is a hot topic these days. In fact, my organization just conducted a massive overhaul of IT infrastructure based on the premise that we were not ‘mature’ in basic services across the board. We not only made that statement of ourselves but for each of the major “customer” organizations we serve. It became the basis of seeking outside support to transform our IT infrastructure using a combination of consolidation and outsourcing in the attempt to buy mature practices and processes.

In the case of IT Infrastructure, we used ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL ), which is pretty much the de rigueur for the infrastructure crowd. Of course, you cannot even begin to discuss maturity models without getting into CMMi, which is the grand-daddy of them all (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/general/index.html ). But CMMi “can seem to be overly bureaucratic, promoting process over substance.”1 And then there’s COBIT, which provides a framework for best practices for IT practitioners (http://www.isaca.org/ ). I will not try to describe our favorite here (OPM3) other than to say that it is a worthy newcomer, which has yet to show its metal. And there are many more created and cultivated for professional use only (or exploitation, depending on your view).

So, you really have to have an understanding of the business strategy, culture and organizational structure to determine how to map a maturity model. Unfortunately, most maturity models do not really address strategy, culture and organizational structure, other than to say, “You should have some”. Most models, because of the heritage from CMMi are myopically focused on the processes and the attempt to reach continuous improvement. They forget that organizational environments are quite different and their desires and objectives are quite different (just like people). We need a model that is able to adapt to organizational context as a precursor to the assessment.

I recently came across a model which ties the OPM3 context to the Organizational Strategy, in a way that finally gives executives something to hang on to for their purposes and also allows the translation of Project-Program-Portfolio processes into Operational needs. Attached is a simple depiction of what is described in detail in the book “Executing Your Strategy, How to Break it Down & Get it Done”, by Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt and William Malek. It shows the context in which effective strategy is defined through the understanding and definition of organizational “Ideation” (defining of purpose, identify and intention), Vision (defining goals and metrics), and Nature (defining culture and structure). Engagement occurs through the interaction of strategy and portfolio management, which then leads to Synthesis (program and project management), which then drives Operations through transition processes. OPM3 clearly fits in the Synthesis and Transition activities and has tried to position itself for the set of Engagement activities. But what has been missing is the context for Strategy, which is the Ideation, Nature, and Vision. Project Management (and therefore Organizational Project Management) is a change mechanism, so it must provide a feedback loop to the Nature and Vision parts of Strategy, and either provide an alignment or change them.

Here are the authors’ six imperatives of strategic investing:

Strategy-Making Imperatives

Ideation: Clarify and communicate identity, purpose and long range intentions.

Nature: Align the organization’s strategy, culture and structure.

Vision: Translate long-range intention into clear goals, metrics and strategy.

Project Leadership Imperatives

Engagement: Engage the strategy via the project investment stream.

Synthesis: Monitor and continuously align the project work with strategy.

Transition: Transfer projects crisply to operations to reap the benefits.

I will conclude this piece by defending OPM3 again. The biggest criticism stems from it being big and complex with its breadth of capabilities. I think it is our jobs to find ways to present it in simpler terms that help others see the core aspect. This means we need to do more to improve the practice and show greater business value. I think it has come a long way and we have all invested ourselves in it. Now is not the time to give up.

Footnotes:
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model

I was invited to participate in the PMI sponsored Focus Group on Sep. 10, along with 9 other users in Philadelphia. PMI reiterated their support of the user community there. (They verbalized their committtment to users at the OPM3 Core Team earlier in the year at a face to face in Miami.)

All that remains is their published plan. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello everybody,

Jim and I got invited to participate at the ProductSuite Focusgroup session 9th and 10th of Setember. I think, it would be interresting to compile some recomendations and suggestions in this forum.

How can PMI generate more value for the tool as well as for the certification?  What should PMI do about the standard OPM3?

What are your painpoints, sugestions and expectations?  Do you have an interresting case to share?

Don’t let us miss the oportunity this new channel offers us.

Best wishes from Brazil

Gerhard Tekes

Do we need OPM3 awareness for to make OPM3 create value for us?
Is OPM3 only interesting for who already has a certain degree of maturity?
OPM3 is limited to “PMI methodology” ambience?

I would like to share an experience with OPM3, a bit off the regular tracks.

If I blindfold you and ask you to find the door, will you? Sure, you will. But, you will spend unnecessary amounts of time, money and effort. You will hurt yourself and others. Your efficiency will be really bad.

Implementing a PMO, Project Management Methodology, Program Management or Portfolio Management Methodology (after 2008 update), ….     Without doing FIRST an OPM3 evaluation, an OPM3 analyzes, an OPM3 snapshot (Who created that term “Assessment” really liked to make life more difficult, increasing the barriers for NEW) is doing exactly this: Trying to find its way blindfolded.

Our company, 3PTA, is a small consulting company in Brazil, less then US$10M turnover and working with a wide range of clients in South America, Europe and Middle East.
One of our clients, the business school from a Federal University in Brazil asked us to support during 4 month the implementation of PMI methodology in an ongoing academic project, scheduled for 5yrs.
The project was won in a public bidding process financed by the national Secretary for Public Security (Police) and has as a goal to transform the Military police, who acts in Brazil as ostentative Police force, in a “Learning Organization“. The bidding documentation defined, that the winner had to use formal project management methodology as described in PMIs PMBOK2000/2004.

In a first meeting, we stated that none of the 3 Sponsors had ever heard about PMI, nor had anybody any idea what project management means nor had they any real interest in implementing more methodology as they were forced to show in the reports. Additional, . in Brazil we have a particular language problem, because in Portuguese, the design, the technical project, is called project as well.
As one of my students studied at the federal University and worked as well on this project giving IT-Support, we decided to create a PMO and to define methodology, with him working as my assistant during implementation. After 3 month, he should become the manager of the PMO.

QUESTION:  How to implement in 3-4month methodology and a PMO in an organization not only absolutely ignorant about Project Management, as well as little interested, if not hostile. Little interested because the pain points are so old, they learned to live with them, cultural aspects - don’t rock the boat-, and most of the consultants feeling being “to good” for to get involved with administrative tasks and procedures. Most consultants in the project were very “brainy” highly qualified scientist, hostile to administrative tasks and rules and the proper sponsors were only interested to fulfill the contract and mostly unavailable.
We did a preliminary scope statement development interview with the sponsors, support staff and 15 of the 60 involved internal consultants and most defined as success criteria that we should not impact on their day to day work. One defined a PMO as responsible for to maintain the Intranet (He was the Professor responsible for the IT support and looking for outplacement).
Definitely a challenge.

We decided to scope the methodology, the processes and procedures to get standardized, focusing on the actual pain points and looking for big bang for the buck.
And we decided to use OPM3, without telling them. Not telling them for not to create more fuzz and for to be able to workaround he hostility and barriers. Most interviews started with, “I got some coffee, want one as well?” and had a really informal character. In the preliminary scoping, we identified 42BPs, which would make a difference for them. We scoped it down to 34. After the assessment, focusing on resource allocation, Project Domain and Standardizing, we found that the business school and it’s administrative staff, without ever having heart about PMI, OPM3, PMP and whatsoever, already had 47 of the 117 relevant capabilities, already had some templates and procedures known and used by most of the collaborators most of the time.
We designed the processes based on what they already had, reducing the barriers for the “New”, started training for the missing capabilities, in the truth, not missing, but undefined, everybody doing it, or not, in his own way. The IT support team set up the virtual space for the PMO in the Intranet, defined some tools (DotProject, Xoops, …), we implemented a rigid scope change control together with the officials from the military police (client’s representatives) and a simple configuration management.
Within 10 weeks, methodology was defined, most barriers were broken down, team development started and with 3month and 23 days, we passed the PMO to its new manager - what caused them, not to prorogate our contract.

Now, after 11month, we received a first feedback, asking for more, The idea is taking the PMO to Dept. level and to increas the number of BPs, including perhaps some portfolio BPs. Perhaps this time, we tell them, that we do an OPM3.

OPM3 is much more than an assessment,
OPM3 is the start.
OPM3 can help you to break down barriers, get less “foreign”-Processes.
OPM3 helps you to cut down significantly the effort and cost when you want to start with Project Management.