PMO Setup – Part III -Specific Goals & Objectives are the Foundation of a Value Added PMO

L ast week, we talked about some of the general Foundations that need to be established in order for you to have a Value Added PMO. During setup and initial planning, you need to establish the ‘footprint’ of your organization; determine the size and capability of what you will support; and most importantly, what it will achieve. In addition, we talked about the need to start from where the output is needed, and work backward towards the foundation. This week, we will work on some specific suggestions for your Goals and Objectives.

While goals and objectives in many organizations and areas are generally nice to have and make great posters for the wall, here we are going to talk about Goals and Objectives that will help make your PMO Organization effective. Far too many times, goals and objectives are constructed and put together so that look very good, but really do not meet the test of the three main criteria that you must meet.

Goals and Objectives must be tangible, measurable and most importantly -  achievable.

That’s correct – Achievable. If you set out and define your goals and objectives that are too lofty and too high, they won’t be achievable and success will be very difficult to come by. In addition, they need to cover areas such as:

• What project schedules will be maintained and how will they be maintained?
• How and how often will project schedules be updated?
• How will reporting on project status be handled at the team level, management, and executive management levels?
• How will action items, issues and risks be handled and reported on?
• What is the weekly/monthly cadence of meetings?

You need to set up the specifics surrounding your goals and objectives, and be sure that they are communicated properly throughout the organization. This is especially true with upper management and the performing organizations and individuals. There needs to be an understanding of the reasons behind requiring someone to use a particular style or makeup of schedule. Information sharing and a comprehension of the reasons behind the goals and objectives are critical to your overall success. For management, it generally centers around receiving common data in a common format that addresses their requirements and provides them the information necessary to both make decisions, and more importantly so that they will be able to help solve problems, as they come up.

For the performing organization, in many times it’s all about assisting them and keeping them away from the hot water! Let’s talk about an example that goes a long way for both organizations. If you want to have a schedule structure that is effective and answers both questions about progress, and also ensures that management is satisfied with the progress being made, the structure of your deliverables must be organized and reported on so that it can be reflected accurately. Many times, especially in larger projects and programs, one of the long lead items can be the development and approval of Project Requirements. If you have a requirements effort, which is always in the critical path, that is going to take 10-12 weeks to complete, having one major task and milestone to report against is going to have the resulting progress and status being reported on in 5% – 8% chunks of time. An alternative is to setup and have the longer lead time items be broken down into smaller measurable deliverables that roll up to the overall requirements effort. Perform a basic functional decompisition of the requirements effort and structure those items into deliverables that can be reported on in 1-2 week increments.

This has the effect of aiding everyone in the organization. For the PMO and Management, it shows definite progress and items being completed on schedule – while having the effect of demonstrating confidence in the ability of the performing organization and especially the project manager. The PM, performing organization and the extended team members responsible for producing the deliverables, get a way to see and measure their tasks – while receiving the satisfaction of knowing that making definitive progress on the final deliverable. They also get the benefit of having entire sections of the requirements completed and pre-approved before final signoff, which is also going to be an advantage. Some years ago, while leading a team with such a task we used this exact same organization and setup in a similar fashion. We benefited tremendously from it for the reasons stated. Result was that we completed the requirements on time and satisfied virtually everyone’s goals and objectives. This was done on a team with personnel from three separate consulting/contracting firms and personnel from the client (SME’s) that were flown in from around the country and had never worked in a project environment before.

Here is a typical section on ’schedule maintenance’ taken from a Governance presentation that was put together for a Data Center Migration project that demonstrates the ‘type’ of information that is needed and expected to maintain and update schedule information. There are several key points that are listed below, that help the overall goals and objectives.

• Project Schedules will be updated on a weekly basis, in accordance with the standard reporting cycle during pre-migration stages of the Program Lifecycle. This includes the Startup and Planning Phases of the program, and the infrastructure Build-out Stage of the Implementation Phase.
  • All project schedules are to be updated and posted by COB, on Friday.
  • On Monday morning, all schedules will be ‘pulled’ so that QA and QC checks can be performed. This includes verification and alignment with weekly 4Up Reporting.
• As we approach Final ‘Build Out’, Readiness and Data Center Migration activities during the Implementation Phase of the Program, frequency of updates will be increased.

Some of the benefits are obvious, but we’ll talk about some specifics. Although project schedules are to be posted by COB on Friday, they will not be pulled and reported on till Monday morning. When pulled, they will have QA  and QC checks performed. The PMO setup a core team of PM’s and Project Coordinators that worked directly with the Performing organization to ensure that the schedules and the status reports made sense, reflected the correct information (key milestone and progress information logged properly on the status report), and most importantly the weekly status went through a first scrub before the program review held on Tuesday. Management understood that this QA activity was being performed to ensure consistency of data collection and reporting and more importantly the performing organization and PM’s understood that the PMO was there to help them achive success, and not just applying the ruler across the knuckles.

In next weeks article, we’ll talk more about weekly status and reporting.

Tagged as: Leadership, Management, PMO, Project Management Office