Now neutral is an interesting word. One might contend that an ambivalent perception of the PMO (what, in essence was recorded) means that they are striking a sound balance between amiable cooperation and implied or explicit threat. On the one hand, is there anything wrong with occupying the moderate, middle-ground? Yet on the other hand it was Oscar Wilde who said “Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.” George Bernard-Shaw was, as ever, a little more direct and forceful “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”

That a community doesn’t regard you as an ally is a possible indicator that they are unlikely to seek positive assistance from you – human’s typically seeking and acting on the advice of a friend or a professional that they hold in high esteem. Professionalism is not incongruent with neutrality, indeed you expect the physician to have no opinion one way or the other about either you or your condition when you present to them; however, if they haven’t taken a stance and formed an opinion by the time you part you will be distinctly worried. In short, we react to friends and foes. Friends are a force for the good and we will seek them out. Foes are a force for the bad and we’ll either engage in fight or flight (depending on our relative strengths and attitudes).

So here’s another question, what is our reaction to neutrality? Typically it is either indifference or grudging compliance with an irksome overhead. Is there a danger that as PMOs we delude ourselves that a steady, middle of the road approach, balancing the demands of management for control against the demands of the delivery community for support, is actually the best way of adding value to the organisation?

Friends or foes you are not indifferent to because, one way or another, they allow or compel you to do things; neutrals have no effect on you in either direction and are likely be treated as either invisible or obstacles to be got around. Perhaps we should review and work on our relationship with our user communities. In the end if both communities (management and delivery) see you as allies you are onto a winner, if one sees you as an ally and the other an enemy well, you are at least getting some reaction and being paid attention to. The worst situation of all is if you are seen to be neither because you run a significant risk of indifference.

If you’d like to know more about the behaviours of allies and adversaries in a PMO context and how to look out for the warning signs, or survey your user community to gain a keener appreciation of your current position, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 01980 283600 or contact Richard Bateman rbateman@citi.co.uk.

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A telling example of this emerged from one workshop/survey, in which people were asked to assess how effective their organisation’s PMOs were at adding value to the organisation. So, in the survey we posed two questions that achieved a paradoxical response. The first question asked whether the PMO provided added value through advising senior management of project management capability – the answer saw 92% of respondents answering that they added significant value through this service with over 25% of responses being in the 90%+ bracket; an unequivocal perception that they really did add value. Two questions later the group were asked whether they maintained any record of capability or experience of the project delivery community; the unequivocal response was no, they didn’t. In a complete reversal of the previous question 87% said they certainly didn’t add value in this way with 50%+ of the respondents sitting in the lowest 10 percentile. In simple terms this means the group appear to be emphatically saying “we add value by advising the senior management on capability whilst having absolutely no record of capability on which to base our advice”.

Unsurprisingly (given the preponderance of PMO officers and managers in the audience) the high level conclusion was that they added significant value. Of course the cynic might say that this is obvious – everyone likes to think that they are adding value so will ascribe anything positive that they do as ‘value adding’. But, of course, this is not true; by definition maintaining the status quo or avoiding a risk cannot add value. It is valuable, in that it maintains an income stream or prevents undesirable outcomes but it does not add value in the sense that we are already enjoying that income stream or level of security and the work doesn’t add to it. Here’s the cognitive dissonance – “if I am doing something that is valuable, which wasn’t being done before, I rationalise that as adding value”. The fact that I am not able to add value is simply overlooked.

This is more than a semantic debate or sleight of hand trickery. Control and administration type PMOs (those that predominated in the other surveys’ conclusions) are inherently low value add. Guidance and partner type PMOs are genuinely value adding in a strategic guidance and cost avoidance capacity. To be misguided about which type your organisation’s PMO actually is prevents the planning and execution that allows PMOs to move to the position that they wish to occupy. In short if you already believe you are in the guidance camp (despite the direct response to questions demonstrating that you can’t possibly be) there is little to motivate or manage the necessary change that would make the reality match the belief.

One of the services that CITI has successfully worked through with a number of PMOs is a straightforward quality and service type analysis of the current position. This is frequently enhanced by strategic modelling of how the organisation might move to a more desirable position than the one that emerges from the initial analysis. Please speak to us on 01980 283600 or contact Richard Bateman rbateman@citi.co.uk if you want to know more about the PMO profiling and planning processes.

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Recently we found ourselves musing on the scarcity, and potential value, of reflecting on and setting strategic direction. This had emerged from one of the surveys conducted amongst a group of, predominantly PMO specialist, project and programme practitioners at a CITI centres of excellence club (CofEe Club) meeting. One of the other surveys from the same meeting strongly reinforces the view that some of our management responses may be lacking in thoughtfulness; one wonders how much better we might be if more time were devoted to thinking and less to simply reacting.

Here is an example; a group of people are asked a similar question twice. Which is the primary area of focus in your current environment? In the first instance the question related to support of management and in the second support of workers. Clearly one would expect the ‘primary’ area of focus to be one or the other. Interesting then to find that both questions received a response in excess of 60% being their primary area of focus. Either a significant number of the respondents are schizophrenic, don’t understand what primary meant, or they didn’t think through the consequence of answering the same way to two diametrically opposed questions.

Of course it would be wrong to draw any hard and fast conclusions from a couple of questions in an informal workshop; but then this isn’t an isolated incident. Some of the other questions within the survey were answered in an ‘interesting’ way; for example over 50% of the respondents said that the PMO was responsible for developing capability whilst 90% said that the PMO kept little or no record of capability. OK, these conditions are not mutually exclusive; you could clearly provide development without measuring or assessing its effectiveness. The question is – would you? And how good, as an example of management practice, would be not doing so? It is these questions and what give rise to them that should interest us.

Please don’t misunderstand us; this is not intended to be an indictment of the participants in some CofEe Club survey, there is a more general point underpinning this. If a group of subject matter experts, for whatever reason, cheerfully suspend judgement in favour of simply ‘answering the question’ we ought to understand why. We also ought to try and understand whether this signals a greater risk that this is a prevalent behaviour in the workplace in general; don’t think about things, just do things. But in a world where there is more choice of things to do than resources or time to do them simply electing to do the things that sound ‘good’ or ‘appealing’ cannot be the right answer – rational choice, predicated on some organiser or model must be a better route for management to adopt.

Thinking tools, such as models, theories and hypotheses all have a role to play in effective management decision making. Experience should not be ruled out and neither should ‘gut feel’. However these are just a framework to facilitate the exercise of thought. What should definitely be ruled out is the impulsion to action, mistaking quick and thoughtless decision-making for sound, thoughtful, judgement-based decision-making.

If you’d like to explore a range of change delivery related thinking and strategic planning tools please speak to us – 01980 283600 or Richard Bateman rbateman@citi.co.uk.

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Participants in one of the work shops were asked to position their view of how their PMO was performing on a four-axis radar plot. The North South axis was essentially concerned with whether the PMOs were predominantly supporting the corporate portfolio (the Northernmost point on the plot) or predominantly supporting the individual projects (the Southernmost point on the plot). Clearly a balanced view of their focus would place them in the middle of this axis.

The East – West axis was formed by a view as to whether their primary function was to support and report to management (the Westernmost point) or primarily to develop and support delivery and good practice amongst the change community/practitioners (Easternmost point). Again a balanced view would have tended towards the centre.

Once the participants had positioned their PMO’s current behaviours they were invited to project the direction and distance in which they felt their PMO ought to develop over the next twelve to twenty-four months. Four informative and telling observations arose from this:

1. The vast majority of plots lay in the Western hemisphere
2. The North/South divide was practically evenly distributed
3. All but one or two organisations envisioned, or at least desired, a significant shift from their current position
4. No one professed to have conducted a similar piece of analysis on their PMO’s position and strategy prior to this exercise.

Western hemisphere bias. Of the seventeen participating organisations only two positioned themselves in the Eastern hemisphere. So, it seems, about 90% of PMOs regard their function as essentially supporting management rather than driving up delivery performance. Given that supporting management decisions is a risk-avoidance, rather than value-adding, perspective the majority of PMOs would be unable to demonstrate any ROI on the investment in them. Yes, they’d be able to justify themselves in terms of risk avoided for the organisation but they don’t inherently see their role as ‘adding value’. Whilst they occupy this space they’ll always be a ‘grudge’ spend (just like insurance – on which you spend the least you can) for management.

North South distribution. The degree of spread along this axis was quite remarkable (9 in the North, 8 in the South) with a fairly even distribution across the whole axis (i.e. a good spread of extremists at both ends and ‘fence-sitters’ in the middle). The obvious suggestion being that, given we’ve determined a Western hemisphere bias, there is a more or less equal emphasis on the organisation sponsoring PMO’s to safeguard the portfolio (a corporate level control function) or safeguard the individual projects (a project level administrative function). A good supplementary question might be who sponsors and therefore owns the PMOs? If it is a project function then you might anticipate the Southern bias whereas if it is a senior management function the opposite, a Northern bias, might be expected. The suspicion is that the governance and financing of the PMO will almost certainly play a critical part in its North/South bias. This may, of course, not be bad or wrong as long as it is a conscious choice rather than an ‘accident of breeding’!

Directions of travel. Given the current location of the various PMOs, the desired direction indicated an overwhelming stampede in an Eastward direction; clearly indicating an overall desire for PMOs to be about adding value rather than being a risk-avoidance grudge-spend. More interestingly was the extent of development; the length of the arrow indicated the desired extent of movement and in nearly all instances indicated a seismic change. Whilst it is not surprising that there is high ambition and a great appetite for change one suspects that the views were not moderated (given their dramatic nature) by an over-lay of reality; what can really be achieved within an organisation within a year or two?
The final interesting observation emerging from the direction of travel was that those occupying the Northern hemisphere had ambitions to move South whilst the opposite was largely true for those already inhabiting the Southern hemisphere. This diagonal cross-over (the South West dwellers moving to the North East whilst the North West dwellers moved South East) was striking. It clearly mirrors an ambition to provide not only a value adding services but also a balanced range of services for both the organisation and also the individual projects. That, or the grass is seen as greener on the other side!

Value of strategic analysis. One is inevitably moved to question why, when all the PMO people present found this an eye-opening and insightful exercise, don’t we seem to spend more time on taking a strategic view of where we are and where we’d like to get to? Where should we point the ‘finger of blame’, if indeed blame is to be apportioned? Are we collectively responsible for being too busy instigating the tactics to focus on the strategic direction? Does the ambition of the sponsor determine a path from which the PMO finds it hard to vary? Do initial behaviours become ingrained and thereafter the focus is on their refinement rather than moving towards a strategic ambition (evolution not revolution)? Or perhaps strategic analysis and direction setting is the stuff of text books and consultants and doesn’t apply to ‘real’ businesses? Of course it could be any one, any combination or none of these factors; the interesting insight remains. Spending a very modest amount of time (less than forty minutes) deploying a very simple tool leads to some profound insights that enable strategic challenges to be surfaced and ultimately pursued. Why then don’t we do more of this?
Please speak to us if you wish to explore strategic analysis or implementation planning any further – 01980 283600 or Richard Bateman rbateman@citi.co.uk.

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