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. (more…)
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. |
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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.
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