Just wanted to drop a line to our readers about the results of the PMO of the Year Award competition. The results are in, and we’re pretty excited … but … we decided to hold off the announcement until Sept. 8 so we can make a splash with a nifty e-book all about the award and this year’s winner and top three finalists. You’ll be the first to know when the e-book is posted for download …

Recently, the HR director at our company shared a thought she had gleaned from one of her HR colleagues on the topic of exit interviews. Why, she asked, do we only do exit interviews? Instead of focusing on why people leave, why not ask the employees who stick around what keeps them engaged with our company?

An excellent question, and one that points up a critical weakness in the way organizations generally approach improvement: they try to identify what’s broken and fix it … rather than focusing on what works well, and investing in it. The good aspects thus are ignored while attention and money go to shore up the bad. It’s as though a gardener ignored the healthy, productive plants in the row and only fertilized and watered the sick ones.

A viable alternative to problem-focused “fixing” (which, like any renovation project, often reveals more and more underlying brokenness as you go) is the method of energizing collaborative efforts known as Appreciative Inquiry. I’ve been on a soapbox of sorts about this method for the past few years, hoping to insert AI into the team-building toolbox of project managers and, like most new concepts, at first it seemed to be going nowhere. Then, in the past 18 months or so, I was asked to write a little about it for a project management textbook; then, PM College incorporated my materials into a team management course, and last November I was asked to speak about it to a group of HR managers in Brazil. Apparently, AI has reached a sort of tipping point. This morning, I found several excellent links on using AI in project management!

Why don’t we “accentuate the positive” – with employees, on projects, and in life? I think it’s mostly habit. It’s easy to spot a mistake or broken place, and harder to understand how the whole system may be working smoothly in spite of it. Like one of those tests – is the glass half full or half empty? – finding out what works well on a team or in a company simply means refocusing our attention.

Yesterday’s big news here was that the PMO of the Year Award judges had returned their results, and after crunching the numbers (applicants are evaluated on a wide array of factors, each of which is rated by the judge on a Likert scale, so the final choice comes down to, sometimes, a .01 difference), the top six turned out to all be from widely different areas of endeavor. They are:

• Auckland (NZ) City Council Programme Office
• Denver Health eHS PMO
• Doe Run Corp. PMO
• IBM PM Center of Excellence
• Southern California Edison SmartConnect PMO
• T-Mobile USA Enterprise Program Office.

We already had the World Cup of project management going, with entries from Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil – just to name a few – in addition to New Zealand. Now we’ll pit government, healthcare, mining, information technology, electric utility, and telecomm PMOs against one another for the playoff.

In checking out these organizations’ websites, I noticed something else: nearly all have some kind of alignment, either primary or secondary, with “green” business initiatives. Either project management goes hand-in-hand with environmental responsibility … or maybe forward-looking organizations embrace both.

Here’s a trick question: What do you call a group that supports project management in an organization?

If you answered Project Support Office (PSO), Project Management Office (PMO), Program Management Office, Hybrid PMO, Portfolio Management Office or an Enterprise Project Management Office …  you are right.

It doesn’t matter what you call it: what matters is what products and services have you been chartered to provide.  If you provide the expected and continued value and benefit to your organization, that’s called success. And the place to lay the groundwork for that success is … from the ground up.

For example, in developing and implementing a PSO – an organizational entity primarily chartered to support a key project or program – you must, as with any project management function, take into account the basic components of processes, people, tools and technology. Here a a few tips, from my experience:

• Sponsorship – As with any project, the PSO or any project management group needs strong sponsorship and in particular a strong champion.  This person needs to have the organizational knowledge and political clout to make the PSO successful.
• Involving the Right People – There are two groups of people that will be instrumental to your success.  The first are those who will staff the PSO.  These individuals face your customer base – they must have the skills and competencies to effectively support project managers and project teams.  It’s best if they have been project analysts or project managers who have walked the walk and have experience in facilitation, process development and improvement and a working knowledge of PM tools. The second group is the core team of customers that will assist in the development of processes, tools and techniques.  Not only does this obtain the necessary buy-in, it also part of an effective organizational change process.
• Process – A common failure point is over-engineer the processes.  Most of us grew up in an environment where processes would fill volumes of three-ring notebooks but that is the past.  Now processes must be lean and adaptable to different situations. You do not want to create a process and hear the first user say: “Can we have the light version?”
• Technology – A technology strategy is a must for the PSO; without it project management-related tools will proliferate – from spreadsheets to project management information systems like Microsoft Project and Open Workbench, to enterprise project/portfolio management systems.  With a technology strategy the PSO can map the right technology to the processes it will support.  Never buy technology and then attempt to map your processes into it!  Instead build your processes and select the right technical solution.

Bottom line – Build it right and you’ll succeed.

We’ve just finished prepping the Second Edition of Kent’s award-winning book, The Strategic Project Office, for press. (Look for it to be available this October.) The first edition came out in 2001, but was mostly written and edited in 2000, and it was a big job to incorporate the changes that have taken place over the past decade. Who can remember the world of the PMO a millennium ago? Here are some things that struck me:

• The terminology has changed. The Project Office is now the PMO, pretty much universally. The addition of the “M” is significant: it focuses our attention on the managerial side of projects, the human and business aspects instead of the technical.
• You no longer have to explain the difference between managing multiple projects and portfolio management. The concept of the organization as a portfolio of projects is no longer a bleeding edge idea.
• The chapter describing project management roles had a complete rewrite. Some of the things that were practically unheard of in the last century: PMOs bringing project managers and other roles under their management, and providing their training, performance measurement and professional development. Project manager competency assessments, and competency-based development. Executive roles within the PMO – like CPO, Portfolio Manager, Executive VP for Project Management.
• The strategic angle. At the first writing, PMOs were almost entirely on the departmental level, and the vast majority of those were in IT. Today, they are all over the map departmentally, from HR to Marketing to R&D. But the majority reside at the strategic level, and the connection between projects and strategy execution has never been stronger.

If anyone is nostalgic for the days when a lonely project manager struggled to get the executive level to listen to her ideas about a project office, I haven’t heard about it. Today’s PMO – the enterprise-level manager of human capital and strategic initiatives bears about as much resemblance to that old organizational structure as a tomato plant does to a tomato seed.

Agreed? — if not, comment … but no throwing rotten tomatoes.