The PMO is making something of a resurgence in many organisations, as change and shifting workforce demands are challenging their ability to keep an eye on the trajectories of costs, benefits, and ROI.
There’s no doubt that the role of the Project Management Office has evolved over the past few years, morphing from control centre to enabler to facilitator of successful project delivery. It can be the functional glue for ensuring that stakeholders, sponsors, and project teams stay on the same page when it comes to strategy and the execution agenda.
As the project landscape has changed quite significantly due to macro-level disruption, keeping up with the needs and demands of organisational transformation has meant that the PMO has had to shift gears repeatedly to stay abreast of how people now work, where technology investments are being made, and broader trends such as AI and machine learning adoption.
So how is the PMO adapting to the ever-changing nature of what types of projects need to be delivered and how they need to be delivered? We look at a handful of trends influencing the PMO’s evolution.
Self-determined work and the flexible/hybrid workspace
How our people work is changing and there’s little doubt that COVID has ushered in or accelerated a more flexible way of work that has fostered the desire for self-determined or self-organising work.
Self-determined work – sometimes intrinsic motivation – is driven by an individual’s motivation, interests, and goals, rather than by external factors such as reward or punishment. Individuals have greater autonomy and control over their work and priorities, leading to greater engagement, satisfaction, and performance. It’s not hard to see why: for many people, it allows for a better balance of choice and control over the work tasks and how they can approach them.
In the pursuit of high engagement, staff well-being, and talent retention, organisations and their PMOs aim to create environments that enable their people to have that sense of autonomy but also work for the overall goals of both the business and the projects they need to deliver.
Naturally, there are challenges. Decision-making cannot be completely decentralised as project scope and outcomes must align to the organisational mission and strategic agenda. Nor are all projects created equal: some are innovative and exciting, which everyone will want to be involved in; others are necessary and include a grind that isn’t anyone’s idea of fun.
The potential of the PMO is to foster the right environment and levels of engagement that’s needed from autonomous work: competence in the individuals’ perceived ability to perform their work, the relevance of the contributions they can and need to make and facilitating connectedness and broader purpose in their work.
The Increasing importance of resource management and change management
Project management is a heavily people-driven function requiring teams to work together to drive outputs and common understanding. Resource and people management has always been a core aspect of the PMO – getting it right or wrong has consequences. But ‘doing it well’ is not necessarily good enough.
Why? Organisations and PMOs are facing some significant workforce challenges in the optimal utilisation of their resources, for example:
- Ensuring that no one is overloaded to mitigate the risk of burnout
- That great employees don’t experience ‘performance punishment’ when they are thrown all the curve balls because of their competency and capability
- Hybrid working intergenerational teams that have different personal challenges and needs in how they engage, work, or are motivated in teams
We are in one of the greatest social experiments of all time as four generations of workers are active in our workplaces and team leaders need to gain deeper understanding and insight of how to communicate a consistent message in a multi-dimensional way that will resonate with each person.
The challenge that project team leaders face internally with communication translates to the broader workforce conversation and the increasing criticality of leveraging change management to deliver project outcomes and benefits successfully.
Whereas in the past, change management would bookend a project with a plan and a comms plan, in the modern project environment, change needs to be embedded at every step of the project from initiation to closure with an engagement strategy that adapts as the project is delivered. Fewer projects are being implemented informally as BAU change as experienced and quality change professionals are more frequently engaged in supporting quicker adoption and faster ROI.
Agile practice and the resurgence of portfolio management
Agile methodology – whether in a pure or hybrid form – remains a popular mode of delivery because of its ability to create collaborative spaces that allow for and embrace a change mindset for execution. When fail fast and refactoring works, the outcomes tend to be stronger than a fully planned and executed approach where all things are ‘known’.
Boxer Mike Tyson once famously said Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face. Now projects are not (always) contact sports, but the sentiment applies. A plan or idea must adapt to a situation when insights or actions show that a course correction or new direction is worth making. Given that COVID gave many organisations a crash course in the need to adapt to the unexpected or perish, it’s unsurprising that Agile has been increasingly the mode of approach to project delivery.
However, there’s a reason that PMOs are making a resurgence in many scaled Agile environments as businesses refocus on portfolio management, resource management, and dependencies.
Many organisations disbanded their PMOs and moved to pure Agile, only to discover that while it fostered greater business unit alignment, scaling and maintaining that alignment became strategically difficult.
Without some enterprise support helping to connect Agile teams with information about what is happening around them, many found that managing the delivery of projects was like trying to land a lot plans on a runway without any air traffic control. Increased chaos, resource consumption, and the potential risk of poor benefits realisation have forced a rethink.
It doesn’t matter how talented teams are or how true their project or mission is, they can’t be expected to know what everyone else is up to without becoming distracted from their own flight path (to fully embrace the plane analogy).
PMOs have needed to shift away from a command-and-control style centralised decision-making to being an informed aggregator and flight controller that can feed the respective teams and projects with relevant information that enable them to maximise their potential without putting other projects at risk.
This helps business leaders see the whole board on where investment is being made, where resources are needed and best utilised, and to de-risk where necessary.
PMO and PM tools and the promise of AI
Look inside almost any organisation; there is an ever-increasing gaggle of tools and technologies to manage projects and their artefacts: Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, Dropbox, OneDrive, Excel, PowerPoint, and the myriad cloud-based platforms for portfolio risk management and reporting.
The latest Office capability that enables more than one person to edit documents simultaneously or that foster better collaboration between teams has been wonderful for creating SteerCo packs, but it doesn’t feel like there has been a major leap forward in technology about how to optimise project delivery and performance, despite all the tools and data we now have access to.
Though some of us may be wary of the promise vs reality of technological advancement, new tools such as ChatGPT have certainly kicked the conversation about the promise of AI into gear. Like the internet before it, people are excited, sceptical, and cautious about its potential to play a pivotal role in the project world.
Many of the conversations are centred around the potential of AI to remove the busywork and, particularly in the project world, to enable predictive analytics to help strategise, accelerate, and de-risk outcomes for more successful projects. Those of use who’ve been in the project game for long enough know that more projects fail than succeed.
For many, the holy grail is being able to predict where projects may succeed or fail by having clear indicators that allow for course correction or anticipate that a project needs to shift to meet its outcomes. The challenge is that predictive analytics need a lot of data and few organisations to the same kinds of projects more than once, which makes predictive analysis at project level not particularly relevant. AI may be more beneficial at the task level, where repeatable processes and tasks can create a lot of busy work for teams that could become more efficient with machine learning to learn how data points connect and streamline processes.
AI has potential in automation, some decision-making, reporting, and analytics. Still, we see the opportunity for PMO teams to get on board, get familiar with where AI is tracking, and explore the potential use cases for project teams (and business as a whole). It’s not there yet, but AI application is evolving rapidly.
The PMO has its place in an evolving landscape – so long as it also evolves
It’s an interesting time to be in the project space as people will remain an important asset to any organisation’s delivery machine. However, the PMO can’t stand still or revert to being the keeper of methodology and framework.
We stand on a long wave of change as organisations continue to grapple with an evolving work environment and accelerating tech. As automation removes more of the busywork and repetitive tasks from project delivery, the challenge is to leverage the potential creativity, innovation, critical thinking and capacity of human capital as it shifts from BAU to project innovation in the long term.
The PMO can add massive value by understanding how the hybrid workforce and technologies can be harnessed well to support change.
To find out more about how Quay Consulting can help your team establish and manage your PMO, please contact us.
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