Some initiatives are just big and complex, with multiple related streams and sub-projects that are best delivered as a program of work. So, when does it make sense to setup a program PMO, what should they be doing and how much value can it really add?
There is a tipping point, from project to program, when an initiative has so many moving parts, may have several streams or sub-projects and normally a large number of resources and parties involved, that it warrants significant oversight to ensure that benefits are realised.
At this point, an accountable leader will contemplate whether a program needs its own PMO to help keep things on track.
Let’s unpack the types of functions that a Program PMO may perform and the value it adds.
Governance and process
A Program PMO can establish standards and governance for important processes, like status reporting, tracking critical milestones, Steering Committee / Project Control Group reporting and more. Any processes of importance can be standardised and governed to ensure quality and consistency and may consider:
- Governance forums and reporting templates/tools
- Project management tools and standards for use
- Best practice guidance
- Financial tracking, procurement, and time management reporting
In many cases, the organisation may have well-established, standard processes – for example, purchasing – that ensure that any delegation of authority or other important company policies remain compliant. In other situations, there is no standard process, and the PMO can help fill that gap.
The value of the PMO is to simplify what needs to be done and when for each project team, which can be particularly helpful when ramping up large teams and ensuring consistency in how tools are used, processes are followed, when the policy is applied and how the data and information flow to the program director and SteerCo to enable decision making. Consistency is key, otherwise, a program of work can quickly find itself out of control, slipping and in the grip of confusion.
Risk management / RAID
For large programs to be successful, it’s essential that risks are communicated effectively and early.
On purely practical terms, those risks are captured in a consistent and useable way as early as possible to create both time and opportunity for mitigation before they have an impact and create issues that need to be remediated. In many cases, a RAID (Risk, Assumption, Issue and Dependency) report is the way to go.
In a single project or stream, a simple Kanban board with a blocker can be enough to meet these requirements, but in a large program, that information needs to be surfaced up at a higher level. This is because in a large program of interrelated projects and streams, those individual project-level risks can take on a bigger meaning to the overall program’s success.
Try to imagine a large program of work represented as a mountain, with layers of people with the leaders at the top, able to look out across the landscape and forward and with some visibility at the base of the mountain. At the base are the teams of people busy with activities to progress the program mission, from their view than can see the detail of the rivers, streams, fields and trees.
Now, a team might have a big oak tree in their path, and it presents a significant risk to their progress further up the mountain. That will be important to that team and, from their perspective, a priority for assigning resources and effort too. The leaders cannot see the tree, they can only see the forest, but what they can also see is what’s on the other side of that forest, and that may not be the direction the program needs to go.
The Program PMO’s value is connecting leadership and teams to provide essential context to problem-solving and the tools required to solve it.
In this scenario, it is perhaps a waste of time and effort to remove that big old oak tree from a path we no longer intend to use, or perhaps, if the leadership is made aware, they can make a priority decision and divert a big woodchipper over to the team to help them progress their important work.
NOTE: Some large program PMOs may see the need to standardise the entire RAID (Risk, Assumption, Issue and Dependency) for similar benefits.
Resource management
Large programs need large workforces. Decentralising resourcing can work but has its challenges, such as:
- lack of onboarding
- lack of consistency in hiring practices resulting in poor organisational cultural fit
- applying appropriate processes or policies and linkages back to budgets and program structures to name a few.
If we think back to that scenario before of thinking about our large program as a mountain, the teams might be working at different ends of the forest and not really be connected to the detail of what the other team is doing, when they will be finished and what resources they have at their disposal, in use or not – which is fair and expected as they need to be focused on their task not worried about everyone else’s work.
Providing a framework for identifying resourcing gaps at a program level can provide the opportunity to maximise utilisation of the resources at a whole and better perform on a cost vs return basis.
If Team A needs that woodchipper to remove that oak and Team B has a woodchipper and it is not in use it can be redeployed with no impact. If Team C needs more resources to build a bridge over a river, they may be able to repurpose Team D’s resources that a ramping down as they complete their work and are already familiar with the program. This avoids to time and cost of recruitment, training and induction/ramp-up time.
Communication
Communication and coordination are major challenges for large programs. Ensuring missions, goals, objectives, and scope are clear and consistently applied from the top of the mountain all the way to the base of the mountain is critical to success. It’s too easy, without support and consistency, for those messages to be lost in translation, land poorly without context, or not delivered at all.
Failure to get this right can lead to major disengagement between the teams and poor ‘on the ground’ decision making, through no fault of their own. Without important and relevant context, what looks like a good decision may be bad.
In the mountain scenario above, we don’t want our teams wondering why they are in the forest in the first place, think the program is a bad idea, or not going in the right direction.
Equally important is the flow of communication back up the mountain.
Without accurate information about progress, risks and resourcing challenges, leadership can be setting a course for failure or create disengagement between teams and people working tirelessly and feeling unsupported.
The last thing a team needs is to be told move forward when they are desperately trying but there is a big ruddy oak tree in the way they need help with.
Also, the last thing leadership needs is to be communicating is a false progress update and set poor expectations about when the program will complete work and at what cost because they don’t know the team is held up and need to spend more money to remove that oak tree.
Projects and programs have differing needs
There are many moving parts to programs of work, and the discipline works for projects doesn’t always directly translate to a program. As a project becomes multi-team, multi-stream or multi-project, the importance on consistency, flow of communication and data across and up and down the structure becomes very critical to the program’s success.
What changes for teams and people from project to the program is that the context is now bigger and more important. That is because they are now working of part of an outcome in program rather than the whole outcome in a project. In its very nature, this affects how risk is managed and decisions are made because they can have a larger effect than what the team or teams can typically see and have more opportunities for solutions than first thought.
For leaders, making the jump from project to program requires different skills and more delegation.
A single project manager can be close to the detail and intimately involved in communication and decision-making. In a program, the bigger it is, the more removed a program manager or director is from the details, it becomes simply impossible to be across everything at low levels of detail.
The Program PMO provides the structure, tools and mechanisms to dive in were needed, make connections when opportunities arise, coordinate large-scale works and track and manage the all-important cost vs return.
To find out more about how Quay Consulting can help your manage your programs and projects via a PMO, please contact us.
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