Healthy, Wealthy, and WiseIs the time nigh for an IT portfolio management office in your organization?By Steve Bonham Continued from Page 1 The CIO can manage the last two groups, but the middle management group can pose a much bigger challenge when rolling out a corporate PMO. Without executive support, the business units will never jump in line. And without business unit support, silos — architecturally and strategically — will continue to be developed, which in turn, will maintain a status quo of unaligned projects and poorly utilized resources. Many new strategic initiatives, such as PMOs, kick off with great fanfare only to wither because of organizational resistance and diminishing executive participation. By improving executive participation in the beginning, organizational resistance will be easier to eliminate in the end. First, a well-represented executive committee should be formed to support the PMO team. An example of such a committee would include the CIO, the CFO, and the COO. Next, the PMO team should present a timeline of executive involvement that is terse, yet frequent and effective. If accountability is shown at the highest level, then business units will have little choice but to follow suit. And what better way to enforce business unit buy-in than to ensure that executive involvement doesn't stop at simple sponsorship, but continues with active participation. Figure 2 shows an example timeline. PMO TIMELINEIn this timeline, the executive committee must complete the corporate strategy and bless the PMO committee membership before they can kick off the PMO initiative. The timeline goes on to require support for cross-business unit activities required of a PMO initiative such as IT fixed-asset inventory and initiative prioritization review. Just as important, the timeline requires executive review of the PMO deliverables at the end of each phase. Finally, if the corporate strategy shifts, executives must notify the central PMO so that proper project audits can continue. Without such clear executive involvement, a project-centric organization will never overcome the political barriers to true PMO introduction. After executive-level sponsorship is acquired and clear corporatewide strategic goals have been defined (a task not to be taken lightly), three committees need to be established early: Business Unit, Project Manager, and Architect. These three groups must be made up of representatives that are sponsored by upper management. For example, a good Business Unit committee would have middle to upper managers from the HR, marketing, finance, operations, and manufacturing departments. As the PMO team guides these three groups in the development of the PMO, organizational change inflexibility will become more apparent. Each of these groups wants to continue their current processes unhindered. Such inflexibility can be diminished if these groups feel that they have a say in the PMO's development. The kickoff meetings with each group should include a request for ideas related to their deliverables. For example, the business units should submit ideas for an initiative methodology, the project managers should present ideas for a project methodology, and the architects should provide ideas for conducting inventories of IT fixed assets. In turn, the PMO team should provide the committees with ideas for communication and workflow tools to be used by project managers and the PMO. The PMO team will then take these ideas and start to develop the methodologies, test some workflow tools, and manage the inventory of IT fixed assets. As more of these PMO elements are added to the initial foundation, the PMO committees will continue to be involved as governing bodies. Such involvement will allow for representatives of the entire organization to ensure PMO compliance while keeping the PMO core team small. With executive and cross-business involvement, organizational roadblocks will be removed to allow the PMO team to concentrate on evolving the PMO through later phases. Furthermore, with organizational support established as the foundations to PMO success, the PMO team will be able to provide a more accurate evaluation of the status and alignment of projects. Thus, the executive staff will be able to base their course not only on the word of the marketplace weather forcaster, but on a clear understanding of the health of their ship. Steve Bonham [sbonham1@excite.com] has a master's degree in Computer Science, and has experience as a software engineer, project manager, and IT manager consultant.
|
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
