What is the Elastic PMO? – a PMO can be considered as not a ‘thing’.
Sounds strange but every organisation is different, they have different norms, behaviours, methods and of course people.
Projects in the same way are unique.
So are PMOs, different types of controls, processes, reports, templates, etc.
I prefer to think of the PMO as a set of collateral to the project. This collateral is the controls, reporting, activities and templates that can expand or contract as the formality of the organisation deploying the PMO requires – not a thing but a bunch of ‘stuff’.
The PMO Basics
There is the ‘iron triangle’ as many know it in projects-land of Time > Cost > Quality.
- Time – covers the Schedule saying when and by whom which activities will be undertaken
- Cost – covers the Finances of the project of programme directing the budgets and expenditure/forecasts
- Quality – covers the Scope of what is to be delivered by the project/programme to achieve the change
Then you have the support activities:
- Reporting – all of the metrics and measurements and progress updates and commentary on how the costs, time and quality are progressing (or not)
- Risks – detailing the areas that have the potential from an impact and proximity perspective to cause significant delay, cost increase or scope change (too keep it simple as a description)
- Issues – the risks that got through and weren’t mitigated
- Resources – profile of the resource requirements and usage against the resource plan
- Dependencies – which activities or resources have dependencies on others within or outside the project/programme
- Changes – requests for change from the planned course of time, cost or quality for many differing reasons
The Icing on your PMO?
I say ‘icing’ not that it should be, just that in many instances the resources are constrained and these areas are often not a priority. The ‘people’ aspect not only of the PMO but the project/programme team also really is key to success.
- Lessons Learned – the opportunity to look at what we did, what went well and what didn’t go so well that we (and others) may wish not to repeat in the future
- Communication – a managed communication plan ensuring that stakeholders and team members are actively communicated with considering the aspects of same/different and time/places
- Lunch & Learns – sessions that are promoted to help educate and share across the team
- BOOM sessions – I have come across a ‘build our office mojo’ sub-group that is wider than the PMO and reaches across the programme / business teams running events (cake days, office competitions, socials)
Is the PMO dead in more agile projects?
The PMO as an entity should always have a place but could be in disguise – retrospectives are lessons learned reviews, burndown charts are progress reports….the PMO ‘stuff’ but disguised in a different form.
The discussion is not around whether the projects undertaken are ‘agile’ or ‘traditional’, but more about how ‘formal’ the organisation wishes to be around it’s resourcing, reporting, finances, audit trail, risks, issues, escalations, dependencies and lessons learned – the PMO collateral.
An organisation that is heavily regulated is not precluded from running projects in an agile way because it operates in a regulated environment, it may well be required to provide greater evidence of it’s activities and spend profile and therefore may require greater ‘PMO’ collateral recorded as part of it’s agile (and traditional) projects.
A software house that is developing consumer apps using Agile/SCRUM may be less inclined to adopt more formal PMO collateral capture and control but will still manage resources, finances, risk, issues, dependencies, progress reporting and lessons learned but using more Agile tools (retrospectives, burndowns, etc) to capture the PMO collateral in a different way.
The Elastic PMO
The PMO is elastic as is evidenced from many organisations and the varied ‘types’ of PMOs we see. There is no one size fits all for PMOs, exactly as there is no one-size fits all for Project teams or Agile teams.
So think of the PMO as not a ‘thing’, but as a collection of activities and collateral that are controlled, captured and reported. Some organisations choose to be more ‘formal’ in their implementation of this control, capture and reporting than others and the PMO expands, moulds and contracts to fit.
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