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Enginuity Technologies

www.enginuitytechnologies.com

info@enginuityit.com | (833) 364-4968

The Project Management Office

A Technology Leader’s Perspective

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About Me

  • Chief Technology Officer at CAP COM FCU
  • 20+ years as a local technologist
  • 10+ years as a senior technology leader
  • Exposure to PMOs in large, corporate environments as well as startups
  • Founder of managed IT services company Enginuity Technologies

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Business Sector Experience

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Common Business Challenges�Reinforcing the PMO Impact Opportunity

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Common Business Challenges

Strategy

  • Lack of a defined vision and strategy can make it difficult to assemble a meaningful portfolio
  • Organic portfolio assembly results in time going towards lower impact activities (i.e., 90% of an organization’s time going towards “break / fix” work)

Priority

  • Ever-changing priorities can make it difficult to develop a stable portfolio that maps out the future with any degree of certainty
  • Without a clear portfolio baseline there is often no reference point to quantify how far the portfolio has drifted from its inception

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Common Business Challenges

Feasibility

  • Many organizations don’t take the time to assess whether the projects in the pipeline can be achieved based on their available resources
  • Projects are delivered that don’t meet functional expectations, are late, or lack quality (resulting in added ongoing operational burden)

Visibility

  • Missing views into the macro level portfolio, as well as the state of its project components, make it difficult for both leadership and team members to run the business effectively

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How does a PMO help?

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PMO– A Strategy Catalyst

  • The PMO team can bring some order to the company’s overall business strategy
    • The team brings the right practical skills and political savviness to navigate this landscape
  • Once a basic strategy is established, one of the most important value-adds of the team is offering guidance (and potentially governance) on how the company spends time
    • Companies that don’t dedicate significant cycles towards strategic, market-winning initiatives eventually get left behind
  • PMO teams are positioned to partner closely with Line of Business (LoB) leaders to drive portfolio innovation
    • Business Analysis activities fuel an in-depth understanding of the opportunities in each LoB
    • An enterprise portfolio perspective informs big-picture thinking

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Prioritization Orchestrators

  • Driving clarity with an emphasis on objectivity is an essential contribution of the PMO team
  • Leveraging the strategy framework helps with rationalization of priority tradeoffs
  • The world is dynamic; establishing an ongoing review to realign as needed is a fundamental component for success
  • Having a priority baseline for the portfolio enables productive discussions in this area

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What is Feasible?

  • One of the most important functions of a PMO team is their leadership in the development of achievable schedules
  • The path of least resistance is to simply add project requests to the portfolio without gauging*:
    • Dependencies
      • Do other initiatives need to be completed first?
    • Availability
      • Do team members have time to work on this request?
  • Facilitating the estimation process is a vital component of determining feasibility

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*Of course, new requests should also always be reviewed through the lens of strategic alignment and ROI.

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Insight is Almost Everything

  • All of the work in the prior slides means little without visibility into status at both a program and project level
  • The PMO team plays a crucial role in providing the organization with a window into progress from a macro (portfolio) and a tactical (project) perspective
  • This level of transparency provides the opportunity for key stakeholders to intervene to help course-correct as needed

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Example from https://www.onepager.com/

Example from https://www.pptwork.com/

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A Few Additional Thoughts

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My 2 Cents…

  • The best Project Managers fully immerse themselves in their projects
    • Simply scheduling meetings and running reports is not enough
    • Strive to deeply understand the intentions and ultimate business drivers of the initiatives
    • Engage with the team daily to discover and address issues proactively
      • It’s amazing how pulling a couple of people together “on the fly” can quickly resolve problems and keep initiatives on track
  • Leverage planning tools (beyond Excel ;) but recognize that they don’t 100% model reality
  • Schedule is not the only measure of success
    • The less obvious costs of only focusing on schedule can be incredibly impactful:
      • Ongoing operational effort that results in higher baseline costs
      • Burned out team members that decide to seek other employers to achieve a better work / life balance
      • Poor customer experiences due to corners that were cut to meet the deadline
      • Lack of capabilities due to features being de-scoped

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Question & Answer

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