In some circles PMOs have had a bad press. They have been perceived as collators of information, constrained by cumbersome reporting processes and detached from the business as usual activities. In striving to offer value to the organisation, the PMO can struggle to provide meaningful information to the top team and or influence positive change in the business. In essence the PMO can find itself operating in a project management and project management theory comfort zone, but in doing so is failing to maximise its true value by not driving the safe delivery of change into the business.

A year ago I joined Ofgem to take responsibility for the PMO. I found a team that had a great deal to offer the organisation, but they were operating under a cloud of low staff survey results and frustrated by not being able to sell a strong message of what it could achieve to senior management and across the business. Changes in top management and a new strategy provided us with a fantastic opportunity to change that. The primary focus was not to look inwardly to re-invent ourselves but to look at the organisation, identify what it needed and design a team with the right skills and approach to meet those needs.

As a regulator, Ofgem needs to direct its resources and activities to provide the best outcomes for consumers. We need to be agile, prioritising and responding to new requirements quickly, while remaining focused on delivering our core business activities in the most effective way. Through publishing our Forward Work Programme we outline our strategic outputs, the initiatives we think will make the greatest difference to consumers in the coming financial year and associated deliverables and KPIs. Our PMO has responsibility for authorship of the Forward Work Programme, and this held the key to our new approach – we needed to stop looking at individual projects and focus on the organisation as a whole.

Our new team has the Forward Work Programme at its heart. Our portfolio function is at the centre of the team, complemented by a BAU focused operational performance team and a delivery and assurance focused project management practice. Collectively we feel responsible for the safe and effective delivery of our organisational commitments and the team structure enables us to keep each other true by balancing attention on business change and operations.

There is a lot of groundwork to be done, mapping our business processes, creating meaningful performance measures and building a skilled and vibrant PPM community. But with a fresh look on the organisational world we are in a strong position to achieve real, lasting success.

If we focus on the business, we will see changes at every level. We will provide the tools and information the project managers need to deliver Ofgem projects in an Ofgem context. Our project managers will focus on why we are embedding these changes into the organisation, and will recognise the vital contribution of colleagues in the business who will turn those changes into operations. We must also consider our role from the perspective of our Board, the CEO and senior leaders, anticipating their needs and providing meaningful and relevant insights that will allow them to take the organisation forward.

Changing our approach will take time, but we have started with a few simple things. To focus conversations, everyone in the team has their own bound copy of the FWP and uses it to add context when engaging with the business. We have a “P word challenge”, to reduce our reliance on project management terminology and we are consciously looking for ways to communicate that will best resonate with our colleagues in the business.

I’m feeling very positive about the changes we are making and the impact our team will have on the organisation in the year ahead. Above all, I’m looking forward to seeing the impact on the team itself, after all, they are our future leaders and one day may rely on the insight provided by their own PMO.

Julie Black Associate Director, Project Management Group Julie Black is Associate Director, Ofgem

The post Creating a Business Focused PMO appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

Let’s expand on that a little. Taking the last part first, you have no business (without prior approval) changing the services that you provide for the worse in order to do something else in addition. So you might reasonably review what you do to see if some things can be done more efficiently (or perhaps not at all) without damaging the business in some way.

So now you have an idea of the resource, in terms of capability and numbers, which you can apply to new areas of activity. Remembering that most PMO activity can be classified under one of: administration, control and guidance, consider which of these is an appropriate target area for the resources at your disposal. Bearing in mind that this is also an opportunity for development, don’t be afraid to set your sights on a ‘stretch’ objective. You may be able to change the assignments of a number of individuals in order to free up resource for more ambitious (and, probably, more value-add) activity than would otherwise be the case.

The first part of the answer is intended to point out that just because something could or should be done, the PMO may not be the most effective centre for the activity. For example, establishing trends in the comparison of business cases with actual business outcomes may not be appropriate if there’s a business performance department which may have access to more data and can bring greater analytical power to bear.

So what might you be able to achieve? Rather than provide a list of candidates, I’ve identified a few areas which may contain opportunities:

1. CMMI. What processes could move up the maturity scale with a push from the PMO?
2. What activities require low FTE for any one project, but for all projects amounts to something substantive, and could therefore be provided as a service?
3. If your organisation’s activity regarding lessons learned doesn’t look for common threads and root causes, there’s a gap to be filled.
4. If innovation is taking place in the way change is delivered, who is monitoring and reporting on the effectiveness of the innovation?

What are your thoughts?

The post How can my PMO start to add more value to the business? appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

CITI Consulting Solutions is proud to be a member of the Milton Keynes Chamber of Commerce and as part of our commitment to the community, we want to give back to other local members in the form of:

• Free attendance to our Change Leaders Networking Event
• Free half-day project health-check workshop (hosted either at your offices or ours)
• Free sign-up to our monthly news Bulletin

We are also keen to help the local community and chamber members by offering discounted rates for our consultancy services, itemised billing for as little as half a day, and no re-chargeable travel expenses to any location with an MK postcode.

To get in touch feel free to contact Nadia Sylvester on 01908 283610, email NSylvester@citi.co.uk – or comment below!

The post Milton Keynes Chamber of Commerce appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

Reasons tend to vary from:

• Lack of stakeholder alignment – the strategic intent is interpreted in an inconsistent manner
• Lack of sound planning – the strategy is not being implemented as stated
• Lack of ‘line of sight’ between benefits and project deliverables – the implemented organisational changes are not linked to the benefits being sought
• Failure to address the ‘people’ issues – change is being constrained by the environment
• Not taking into account dependencies between projects in the change portfolio – strategy implementation is flawed.

From our experience working on large transformation projects, we have found that implementation effectiveness can be markedly improved by testing whether the stated strategy and vision can be executed through the designed Target Operating Model (TOM) for the ‘new’ organisation; our strategy implementation planning model is depicted in the schematic:

Confirming the organisation’s current (‘as is’) and future (‘to be’ – the vision) states enables the identification of the gap between the future and current organisational states leading to a thorough understanding of what needs to change and how. Having confirmed the changes that the vision demands of the organisation, the next step involves the mapping of the intended benefits to necessary organisational changes and to project deliverables, developing the ‘value model’ of the programmatic change.

During this process questions that should be asked include:

• What type and balance of benefits are we interested in?
• What changes do we need to introduce to our current operating model?
• Which project deliverables will induce the desired organisational changes?
• What business areas are going to be affected by the change initiatives and by how much?
• What types of resources do we need to successfully implement the projects and realise the benefits?

Validating the benefit claims using fundamental parameters (factors in the business and the market environment that underpin the assumptions for benefit statements) is a powerful way to help prioritise the ‘right’ projects in the change portfolio based, among other things, on the benefit realisation profile.

The outcome of such an approach is the design of the new TOM which describes at a high level, the future structure of the organisation, setting out the relationships between people, culture, skills, processes, technology and products.

Such an approach can add value to the organisation in several ways:

• Testing whether the articulated strategy is executable through the designed change programme
  strengthening stakeholder buy-in by aligning the vision and expectations
• Enabling the execution of ‘what-if’ scenarios optimising the change portfolio and reducing risk and complexity
• creating a proven plan to deliver specific types of benefit.

Costas supports clients in the private and public sector throughout their change initiatives from the initial vision setting stages, to identifying and clarifying the anticipated benefits, to establishing the right metrics to track benefit realisation, to facilitating conflict resolution amongst stakeholders.

First posted on LinkedIn here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-does-strategy-implementation-seem-issue-costas-chryssou

Costas can be contacted by email here cchryssou@citi.co.uk

The post Why does strategy implementation seem to be such an issue? appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

In this article I’ll discuss how to prepare for that difficult conversation using a simple four-step plan:

1. Situation analysis
2. Options development
3. Options selection
4. Communication

1. Situation analysis

It is important to understand what the situation is quite clearly. You haven’t got the leisure to conduct detailed root-cause analysis which would, in any event, probably be irrelevant to the current situation. However you should have a clear insight on the situation from at least two perspectives what is wrong? And what are the consequences or ramifications if it is allowed to remain wrong? Remember Einstein said “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

2. Options development

There is always more than one way of dealing with things and the most obvious may not be the best or optimal; it is worth carving-out some time to look at the available options. At this stage you should have no clear preference for any option; all options that will address the situation are contenders and should be given equal consideration.

3. Options selection

Ultimately, of course, you do need to select one of the courses of action to pursue. This should be done on a ‘business case’ basis that is balancing the three considerations of cost, benefit and risk. Cost has to be considered from a variety of perspectives and not solely cash; for example time, in stressful situations, is often at a premium. Benefits are a question of what, beyond resolution of the situation, is the ‘spin off’ or additional benefit or utility of each option. Finally consider the risks, this is the risk to the resolution of the situation as well as to the implementation of the option. Once you are satisfied with the option you have selected you can take one of two courses of action, you can either enact it or communicate your intention of enacting it.

4. Communication

By this stage in proceedings you have assessed the situation and can justify the selection of a remedial course of action. If you have followed the preceding three stages thoroughly (or at least as thoroughly as time will allow) you should have confidence and conviction when you come to communicate it. The usual laws of good communication now apply; be clear what response you need from the person or group to whom you are communicating. The effectiveness of a communication can only be assessed from the perspective of the effect it has. Once you have established this then select the most appropriate mechanisms and vehicles to deliver your communication (including the anticipated form of feedback) and then execute it.

Practice makes… better

As with anything else familiarity with the process steps and rehearsal will always increase your competence against the day you need to deploy these skills for real.

Prepare yourself for the difficult conversations by practising this simple set of tried and trusted processes in your day to day project interactions, so that you will be able to use them to help you through the inevitable stressful situations.

The post Preparing for that ‘difficult’ conversation appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

Panic!

Have you ever had that horrible surge of panic in your project? Everything is going as expected, if not exactly to plan, and then, without warning, disaster strikes. A contractor comes up and says “the plug in adaptor doesn’t fit, we’re stuck!” or “the pumps gone down and the spare is missing” or “it didn’t happen in testing but half the data has come through corrupted” or, well, just about anything you really don’t want to hear. One unwelcome aspect of this news is that you know that sooner, rather than later, you’re going to have to have an ‘interesting’ conversation with your sponsor or some other senior stakeholders about this.

The real trick is not to go into a panic but to smoothly, calmly and professionally respond to the situation. However, it is in this area that the junior or inexperienced project manager can easily come to grief. Part of the problem is that people don’t like surprises. They tend to over-react to them. Sponsors and senior management are no more immune to this tendency than any other member of the project and programme community. The way in which they are often different is that they can come across as intimidating or angry and their opinions do matter.

Golden rules

There are several ways of dealing with such situations and awkward stakeholders. But there are two golden rules:

1. Don’t panic
2. Don’t communicate until you are prepared.

Don’t panic

Isn’t “don’t panic” a great bit of advice? How often have you heard it? How often have you achieved it? So before we prepare to communicate, let’s think about some panic reduction techniques. Of course, for many people this is easier said than done. However there are a few simple tricks to remember to calm your nerves.

Take a deep breath

Yes, it sounds elementary but it really works; here are some potential reasons why:
The act of breathing in deeply puts more oxygen into your bloodstream which, in turn, gives the brain a little spike of clarity, which is precisely what you and it need.

Oxygenating your bloodstream has a calming effect on you and, astonishingly, on other people (probably because they see you looking calm and, in their sub-conscious, they are thinking if you are calm, you are probably in control).

Whilst it may sound trivial the act of taking a deep breath is you starting to consciously exert control which will boost your confidence and it is vital that you maintain control, confidently.

No matter what your level of experience you are unlikely to get this wrong and so you will have taken a first positive step (always remember it is easier to build on positives).

The time taken to breath in is valuable thinking time (with your freshly re-oxygenated brain) and prevents the impulse to start doing things before consideration – thinking time is valuable and likely to be in short-supply.

Three key things to remember

1. The situation is important but it is seldom critical

Quite literally unless death is imminent it is unlikely to be critical. Things can be hugely important, massively urgent, pressing, demanding and or challenging but critical is in a league of its own; if you don’t deal with it now someone is going to die. But even then one is always reminded of the old television advert for insurance that made a virtue of not turning a crisis into a drama. Remember ‘keep your head’ and you can use it to make the right decisions.

2. This is not the first time

Given that the situation is not critical, remember that you have survived similar situations before. In fact the way in which you dealt with those previous situations means that you are better prepared to deal with the current ‘crisis’. In other words, those experiences have made you stronger, and that includes both the successful responses AND the ones where you didn’t do so well.

3. You ARE capable and you MUST show confidence

It is a well-known maxim that senior managers will have confidence in you, if you can demonstrate some confidence in yourself. A particularly useful video on this subject can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are

Amy Cuddy is a world expert on how control of our body language can have a positive effect on our performance in stressful situations. Take a look at what she has to say. In a nutshell, she recommends that you ‘fake it until you are it’.

Calm? In control?

In my companion article I will discuss Preparing for that “difficult” conversation using a simple four-step plan:

1. Situation analysis
2. Options development
3. Options selection
4. Communication

The post What do you tell your manager when the wheels come off? appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

A recent PMI survey [1] reported that 55% of organisations frequently use formal portfolio management, a 5% increase over the previous year. Similarly, a PwC survey [2] reports that 53% of respondents across industries and sectors from retail, insurance, auto, banking to manufacturing and telecommunications, use portfolio management techniques and methodologies.

Effective portfolio management entails the constant allocation of scarce resources to projects by balancing cost, risk, and financial or strategic benefits or risk avoidance and any dependencies between projects. The task is complex and onerous since many options of viable combinations of project portfolios are present and multiple stakeholders, sometimes with conflicting agendas, compete for scarce resources.

Portfolio management allows the executive team to obtain a holistic view across the group of projects and programmes allowing them to understand the portfolio’s value and strategic alignment – ‘show me your project portfolio and I will show you your strategy‘. Portfolio management employs three basic approaches:

• value maximisation
• resource optimisation
• risk diversification.

Portfolio management involves ‘art’ and ‘science’ skills.

I used in the blog’s title the question “portfolio management: ‘art’ or ‘science?’” because a colleague of mine pointed me to an article explaining how Google has built  image recognition software that enables an artificial neural network of computers to see shapes in images; the by-product of this is some surprisingly creative and unusual pictures [3] – culmination of ‘art’ and ‘science’! This is also the case with portfolio management.

The ‘science’ part may entail plotting all possible portfolio combinations to identify those that represent best value for money; based on the constraints we have imposed (cost, benefit, risk, resources and inter-dependencies, and any possible mandatory projects). These value-for-money portfolio picks represent the ‘efficient frontier’ of the portfolio – the portfolios along the top edge of the plot cluster, as shown in the schematic.

Such an approach not only allows us to identify the most high value portfolio combinations, but also to directly compare portfolio picks that include both financial and strategic benefits, and plot risk-adjusted values against risk-adjusted costs on a scale of arbitrary units; the scale will be a reflection of the value that the organisation puts on the various benefit categories.

And here is where the ‘art’ part comes into play. The efficient frontier methodology, although powerful and value-adding, cannot substitute for effective decision-making from the senior executive team. It is senior executives that need to select the most appropriate portfolio best aligned to the strategy of the organisation and it is for them to determine the type and balance of benefits they are looking to realise by executing the ‘right’ portfolio of projects.

[1] http://www.pmi.org/~/media/PDF/Research/2012_Pulse_of_the_profession.ashx

[2] http://www.pwc.com/mx/es/industrias/proyectos-capital/archivo/2013-08-insight-trends.pdf

Costas supports clients in the private and public sector throughout their change initiatives from the initial vision setting stages, to identifying and clarifying the anticipated benefits, to establishing the right metrics to track benefit realisation, to facilitating conflict resolution amongst stakeholders.

First posted on LinkedIn here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/portfolio-management-art-science-costas-chryssou

Costas can be contacted by email here cchryssou@citi.co.uk

The post Portfolio management: art or science? appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

However, innovation in the public sector is less about new products and more about improving efficiency and quality of outcomes. Innovation can therefore not only be linked to technological innovation leading to “Product Innovation”, but it can involve internal organisational processes and structures leading for example to new approaches to client services – “Client service innovation” – or new approaches to reaching clients – “Marketing Innovation” – or new methods for transforming information – “Information Innovation” – and so on.

The Publin report D20 introduces the concept of innovation in the public sector as a “…deliberate change (in behaviour) with a specific objective in mind “Innovation and change share a common DNA and in the public sector innovation and change are linked to improvements and novelty in systems, processes and products that add value to the public by allowing them to be more efficient and effective. In other words, innovation in public sector organisations involves the successful implementation of change.

So what can the private sector learn from the experiences of the public sector about the challenge of changing organisational structures, processes and behaviours?

Innovation examples in the public sector include: the use of new technology; the drive towards public-centric processes with the view to deliver simpler services and greater convenience; or the empowerment of staff and the public to better engage and participate in the design and implementation of new policies/services. To enable all these innovations to be successfully delivered in the public sector organisations we need effective change management methodologies and approaches.

Many of the barriers to innovation are common to both the private and public sectors; resistance to change, risk adverse cultures; centralised structures, internal politics, etc.

Some of the lessons learnt from the public sector innovations are:

1. Promote collaboration and collaborative working cultures within and across divisions and departments by identifying clear accountabilities and mapping (sometimes even creating) the cross-organisational interdependencies that need to work in order for the desired outcomes to be achieved
2. Beware that ‘fear of failure’ stifles innovation and change in organisations: in fact successful change organisations tolerate failure as part of learning, and growing change capability
3. Articulate an all-encompassing vision of what the change initiative will accomplish and align all stakeholders behind the vision
4. Capture all the expected benefits and the changes in the organisation that will realise the benefits and then establish the right metrics to monitor and track benefit realisation following the end of the change initiative
5. Smart individual and group incentives are needed to instil the desired culture. The most successful of these are about recognition of efforts and achievements, rather than financial reward.
6. Finally, be careful what you measure and what you reward, as this will strongly influence behaviours, sometimes in unintended ways.

Costas supports clients in the private and public sector throughout their change initiatives from the initial vision setting stages, to identifying and clarifying the anticipated benefits, to establishing the right metrics to track benefit realisation, to facilitating conflict resolution amongst stakeholders.

First posted on LinkedIn here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-change-behaviours-can-private-sector-learn-from-public-chryssou

Costas can be contacted by email here cchryssou@citi.co.uk

The post What change behaviours can the private sector learn from the public sector? appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

I found myself carefully considering the various ways to establish benefit attribution – how much of the overall organisational value brought about by a change programme can be claimed to have been caused by the activities of a specific project as opposed to other things that were going on at the same time?

If this is what we mean about benefit attribution, does it matter how much change/impact was caused by a specific project out of the portfolio of projects of the change initiative? At one level the answer might be “no”; as long as the overall change programme resulted in the desired business and operational changes and brought about the improvement of value as determined by the change stakeholders then the value of the specific projects should not matter.

Although this might be the case, there are many projects that are required by their funders to demonstrate impact; how and to what effect they spent the funds allocated to them. This is particularly the case for public sector organisations that rely almost entirely on public funds to operate. In these cases specific project benefit attribution can be of particular importance, and managers may have to claim specific benefits in order to justify projects.

In our view the importance of benefit attribution lies on the fact that it should be linked, among other things, to organisational learning; if a project generated 80% or 90% of the organisational value then the organisation needs to identify this and learn from what went well as part of its improvement processes. At the same time if many projects resulted in the same benefit then questions need to be asked about appropriate prioritisation of projects and overall portfolio management within the organisation.

Regardless of the intentions, accurate attribution becomes increasingly difficult post project and it is therefore important to ensure that it is addressed within the lifetime of the project when there is a specific focus on the development area, further enabling better implementation of intended changes within the organisation.

One way we have found that helps to identify benefits and makes the benefit management and attribution process easier is mapping the overall organisational strategic objectives, to the benefits (B) that each planned change programme or project will realise, to the specific organisational changes (Impacts) within the business to be introduced and their specific and measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), to the project deliverables (P).

Through the development of a ‘line of sight’ between the intended benefits, the changes to the organisational blueprint and the project deliverables it is possible to identify potential ‘widows’ – changes that are not associated with any mechanism able to cause or support the necessary changes within the organisation and ‘orphans’ – deliverables that are not linked or needed to deliver the changes and benefits being sought. This process will further identify which projects are responsible for which benefits making the benefit attribution process much easier.

The undertaking of such a process, apart from enabling easier and better benefit management and attribution has several other positive effects on change initiatives:

• It enables stakeholders to test whether the articulated organisational strategy is executable through the designed change programme
• It strengthens buy-in from all stakeholders through a compelling visual map of benefits, impacts and products with direct links between them
• It enables the execution of “what-if” scenarios optimising the project portfolio and reducing delivery complexity, risk and cost
• It creates a proven plan to deliver specific types of benefits (financial, strategic or risk avoidance) to the organisation.

Costas supports clients in the private and public sector throughout their change initiatives from the initial vision setting stages, to identifying and clarifying the anticipated benefits, to establishing the right metrics to track benefit realisation, to facilitating conflict resolution amongst stakeholders.

First posted on LinkedIn here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-we-care-enough-benefit-attribution-should-costas-chryssou

Costas can be contacted by email here cchryssou@citi.co.uk

The post Do we care enough about benefit attribution? Should we? appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.

In this ‘Digital Age’, digital natives and start-ups find this environment natural but for businesses established long before digital (incorporating just about most of the players in our industry) adjusting to this new world takes a little more effort. Business Architecture@AXA exists to anticipate change and help deliver transformation at a quality and pace expected by its customers. To be successful, AXA’s Business Architects need to be forward looking, agile and highly effective communicators. Business Architects are expected to be knowledgeable in any business area they are asked to work in or to learn quickly!

A good example of a challenge facing most organisations is; ‘how do we drive value from the sheer volume of data available in an ethical, compliant and legal way?’ Using the tools and skills at their disposal, Business Architects must understand ‘Big Data’ from many viewpoints:

• How could better and more structured data improve the business?
• What additional information security and compliance risks does ‘Big Data’ bring?
• What technology exists to harness ‘Big Data’?
• Which vendors are leading the market?
• How will richer data add value?
• Do we already have the capability that we can reuse in the business?
• Do we need the capability in multiple places?
• What is the optimal Target Operating Model for managing our data?

In fact, these types of questions are relevant across the organisation for all types of capabilities.

The role of the Business Architect@AXA is to help the business find the right questions and to answer them in support the transformational design that will deliver its vision. But Business Architecture cannot replace the expertise needed in business transformation, no more than an architect, in the traditional sense of the word, can design, source materials and build an entire building on their own. An architect’s role is simply to get the best outcome with the resources available by translating someone’s vision into a reference document (a blueprint) that all other experts work from.

In our ‘Big Data’ example, Business Architecture@AXA is at the heart of building a data target operating model using Information Security, Compliance, Enterprise and Solution Architecture, Procurement and Operations to translate the vision into a business blueprint capable of driving the change that will not just keep pace with customer expectations but exceed them.

Business Architecture plays a vital role in supporting AXA deliver change at the pace expected by today’s consumers. And it doesn’t stop there. As Business Architecture@AXA matures, its vision is to be ahead of consumer expectations so that AXA can spin up and scale the type of agile, innovative change currently only seen in digital natives and start-ups.

Geoff Grace Business Architect AXA UK Geoff Grace is Business Architecture & IT Strategic Planning Manager, AXA Insurance

The post How business architecture @AXA is a game changer appeared first on CITI consultancy solutions.