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 Process Improvement

Scaling up: A PMO strategy to achieve bold outcomes

09/20/2023

by Thomas Moseley & Justin Downey

It’s a scenario you’re probably familiar with: A department or team leader is managing a full slate of operational tasks and projects. Just when everything seems doable, the team is chosen to lead another bold, new initiative. Getting this new project off the ground isn’t the hard part–it’s a great opportunity and will make a big impact. The challenge comes when the initial excitement wanes and roadblocks start to pop up. Navigating siloed departments. Managing vendor schedules and deliverables. Maintaining traction. Overseeing employee responsibilities for both day-to-day and project-related tasks. Add those to the already long list of regular job responsibilities, and you have a recipe for frustration. The antidote? It may be found in a new project management office (PMO) strategy.

Seven Signs It’s Time to Re-evaluate Your PMO Strategy

1. Unrecognizable vision. Evolving from the original project vision is a natural byproduct of weeks or months of work. Deeper analysis leads people to identify new opportunities or recognize problems that went undetected. Though helpful, this is also how scope creep happens. Pretty soon, a six-week project to identify a new CRM software has spiraled into a six-month system overhaul.

Solution: Help teams hold onto the original vision and remind everyone of the “why” behind the work. Even a brief touchpoint between the PMO and the team can ensure that everyone is reminded of the “north star” guiding each decision. At the same time, the PMO can track and appropriately prioritize those additional opportunities to improve. If the vision really does need to change, the PMO can leverage a system of checks and balances to deploy additional resources, as needed.

2. Undefined process governance. As a company grows, establishing or improving process discipline and governance can often fall to the bottom of the to-do list, especially as urgent and important tasks come up that directly relate to driving growth. However, if left unchecked, this can result in runaway project budgets, inconsistent management across departments, and mountains of valuable legacy knowledge stored in the minds of tenured employees, but never propagated amongst teams or formally documented.

Solution: Drive clarity and accountability through strong governance structures that are applied uniformly across departments and vendors. A healthy PMO strategy for the project or company opens distinct escalation channels, enables standardized documentation, and drives crystal clear ownership for each party involved in the structure.

3. Ambiguous responsibilities. Few things in life are as black and white as a budget evaluation: You’re either within the parameters, or you’re outside of the original scope. Things become less clear when you dig deeper to see who approved which decisions, where priorities were shifted, and what groups are responsible for which line items. When teams lack a broad understanding of projects and workstreams, everyone feels the effect of ambiguous authority, anemic accountability, and delayed decision making.

Solution: Establish a clearly defined program or enterprise organizational chart that accounts for all in-flight projects and workstreams. Ensure that everyone can access the snapshot of each party and their responsibilities. Who has final say on prioritization? Who can authorize a change order? Are there any decision points that require sign-off from multiple people? Documenting and sharing this information will boost ownership via clear accountability. When things are brought into the light, everyone benefits.

4. Lack of cross-departmental collaboration. It’s only natural for each team to focus on its own initiatives and objectives, but sometimes that internal focus can result in siloed or unresponsive departments when major input is needed.

Solution: Build intentional lines of communication and clear support channels to protect your team from being inundated with banal requests or bogged down by competing priorities. A right-sized PMO can take responsibility for managing those communication and support channels. By holding consistent touchpoints with each relevant party, this group will be alerted to shared risks and dependencies, and can help prioritize projects accordingly. For example, a retail company may need to implement a technology change freeze during peak seasons, like Black Friday. The PMO can facilitate this and, as an external authority, can ensure that all parties are given reasonable timelines and sets of expectations.

5. Inconsistent communication. As the saying goes, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Once the bullets start to fly in the heat of managing a large project, it’s important that each team member in the trenches is able to communicate with one another. When communication is spotty, too many assumptions are made that end up resulting in re-work and change orders that could have easily been avoided.

Solution: Establish both consistent touchpoints and a central asynchronous channel for project updates to ensure everyone is able to receive vital information. Planning for, creating, and (most importantly) using these communication channels will help teams pivot when challenges arise and ensure that no party is left in the dark because they were inadvertently left off of an outdated email chain.

6. Unclear dependencies between teams. Leaders often express concern about their team being held to another group’s key milestones and timelines, without first being able to incorporate those tasks and requests into their team’s existing work plan. External assumptions about bandwidth can cause balls to be dropped, tasks to be missed entirely, or handoffs to become sticky at critical points of progression. Additionally, unclear priorities and interdependencies can create confusion and slow down progress.

Solution: Create an end-to-end PMO program roadmap with clear milestones, timelines, and dependencies. Acknowledging the need for and naming inter-team dependencies will enable leaders to plan for and delegate tasks appropriately, while ensuring that their own operational tasks and initiatives are taken care of. Additionally, “go/no go” checklists can be used to inspect progression at a granular level to ensure critical milestones prevent change orders down the line.

7. Out-of-scope vendor decisions:  When it comes to keeping up with your regular responsibilities and taking on bold new initiatives, actively managing external contractors can be one of the first things to slip. With a trusted partner, this might be a big help. However, there’s also a risk that unchecked change orders or timeline updates negatively impact the project budget or key milestones.

Solution: Include external vendors as active participants in your PMO meeting and hold them to the same level of accountability, documentation, and rigor as any other team or department on the project. Include expectations for things like weekly written status updates and attendance in PMO meetings as stipulations in the statement of work.

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It is critically important to tailor your governance to the right size for your organization. Just like building a campfire, every team needs oxygen to breathe. Too little governance will result in untamed wildfires and runaway teams; too much governance and you’ll choke out any warmth or ability to act autonomously.  A healthy PMO requires balancing that tension but opens clear escalation channels, standard project documentation, and drives crystal clear ownership for each party involved.

Is your team experiencing any of these symptoms? If so, fill out the form below to start the conversation about getting your project back on track.

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