Is your PMO ready to fire in 2023? This is a must-read for organisations ramping up project investment and transforming or have big expectations for where they will land in 2023.
The Festive Season is often a time to reflect, rest, and prepare for the new year. For some organisations, a new year may bring with it a new direction, a ramp-up of investments, and an increase in the number of projects they want to deliver.
When demand is shifting or expanding, it is inevitable that there will be some growing pains and there are two critical challenges that leaders can keep an eye out for, as they can erode progress.
Overlapping projects and change
Perhaps the most common challenge that befalls an organisation that has significantly increased the number of projects it delivers is the overlapping impact and change.
Often, portfolios and PMOs change or release calendar shows when project go-live plans are due, and they may stagger them to allow operational teams to focus on logical groupings of change. Projects can not be endlessly stacked on top of business-as-usual activities because they place increased demand on subject matter experts and leaders to support.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a ‘golden rule’ of scale to point to that will help organisations to find the right balance of project delivery cadence and change impact management. It is a balancing act that would ideally be calibrated for the organisation’s readiness for change will be different for each team. Ultimately, the key issue at play is capacity.
Understanding capacity constraints and cadence
Capacity becomes constrained in an organisation when the operational parts of the organisation cannot provide enough leadership or subject matter expertise to support the expanding demand of a growing project portfolio. Whilst it might be easy to scale project managers, business analysts and change managers using partners or from the market, the challenge is providing them with access to knowledge and context.
Understanding the nature and cause of the capacity constraint is important as that will help employ the right approaches to mitigating the issue. Some common causes are:
- Starting all projects at the same time: This creates a wave of demand on the organisation as each project goes through similar phases at the same time. The peak periods of impact on stakeholders tend to align, creating big chunks of demand that people cannot absorb.
- Inability to supply: Being unable to free subject matter expertise from operational responsibilities to support projects slows down and can even halt progress. The root cause may be how essential someone is to operations, or it may be a lack of funding to provide backfills or increased operational capacity to run and support projects.
- Unclear priorities and rules of engagement: Project managers will naturally push for priority, it’s in their nature, but when stakeholders are supporting multiple projects and the priority is not clear, they often provide all projects with leaner support and slippages happen and/or quality is reduced.
The obvious cost to capacity issues are project delays, extensions and missed deadlines, but the lesser seen cost is the impact to quality, when decisions are rushed, sponsors and too busy to give a project the attention required, testing or designs become compromised, and the benefits or customer experience becomes negatively affected.
One way for an organisation to mitigate these challenges is by creating a stakeholder impact analysis to understand the level of effort and time required to support a project. It doesn’t matter if it’s a PMO, Portfolio or SAFe — having a means to understand the subject matter expertise, product/business ownerships, and sponsorship demand of projects across the organisation will allow for planned and coordinated responses.
The designed effect is the balance of demand and capacity, the ability to flag critical choke points and provide each project with a pathway and the support to succeed.
Shifting needs and capabilities
There is also a lesser thought of challenge but one we see the consequences of regularly.
Embarking on transformative change often comes with attempting new types of projects and innovations which will challenge existing resources and ways and working. Even when you have enough project managers for the volume of projects on the slate, the next step is to have a good look at whether you have the right project managers for the types of projects you are undertaking.
When there has been a big shift in the types of projects, the workforce also needs to adapt, and it might not be a matter of capability, the project managers may be very good at doing the projects we have always done, but that doesn’t mean they will have the necessary experience to do the projects we want to do in the future.
As an example, Quay worked with an organisation with a long and successful history of delivering engineering and technology projects, but the project portfolio shifted to being heavily skewed to digital. Whilst they had enough project managers, they didn’t have any with the necessary skills and expertise to be successful on some of the new projects. Sometimes the shift to transformation and innovation projects is sustained; other times it is not.
Resource augmentation and partnership can help accelerate a shift by bringing in the right capabilities quickly and, with collaboration, can help bring the existing people who are open to the challenge and opportunities up to speed. Other times it’s necessary to partner because the capabilities are not required long term, and this provides organisations with choice and flexibility.
Growing pains will shift over time
There are many types of growing pains, and some will experience challenges in dependency management, benefit/milestone tracking, and financial management — almost every PMO process will be tested in some way when there is a shift in the types of projects done and the volume of projects. The key here is to expect challenges, as they will come up in the first quarter of 2023.
Have some plans in place and react when needed.
If you’re interested in talking to us about how change and the PMO can drive your delivery agenda in 2023, please please contact us here.
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