Creating the project office 15

Once the organization begins to regularly embrace and practice solid PM techniques and methods, the foundation is laid for further consideration or cre- ation of a project office. The office serves as a sustenance mechanism to keep the organization on track and moving forward as it continues to embrace PM ever more deeply. The formation of a corporate support group for PM does much to awaken the whole organization to the need for PM and to enable the sharing of best prac- tices. However, over time, organizations tend to become stagnant if not reinvented or challenged. There are also ongoing changes and business pressures that cause stress in terms of participating in this type of group; people lose interest if they discover their participation is not reflected in performance appraisals, or if they get no relief from other time pressures. As the 3M PMSIG has prepared fertile ground for PM and planted seeds all over the corporation, many new PM enti- ties have sprung up to reflect the current business challenges and conditions and facilitate the migration of PM best practices within the corporation. For example, as more project offices are formed, the PMSIG developed a sub- group called the POF (Project Office Forum), made up of the heads of many of the smaller (and larger) project offices throughout the company. POF meetings are similar to the larger meetings of the PMSIG but differ in scope and content. Several of the larger divisions also formed smaller focused groups of project lead- ers and team members, such as the Project Management Professional Association within Corporate IT Applications, and the Project Leader Forum in Traffic Con- trol Materials. These support groups also need to be careful to reexamine and reinvent them- selves periodically so that they stay in touch with the true pain of the organiza- tion and do not just become part of the corporate bureaucracy. Several other ideas are currently in use to keep the PM support movement alive at 3M: • Continue to encourage and provide opportunities for project leadership career growth, including such things as formal career paths, external or internal cer- tification, greater program and project visibility, and recognition. • Encourage the maintenance of flexible methodology frameworks that can pro- vide standardization at a higher level but enable substantial discretion and flex- ibility at the detail level—in other words, they do not want to standardize themselves into a corner! People will run the opposite way if too much rigor is imposed on them. • Continue to review, update, amend, and enhance the models (competency and environment) that guide the project and portfolio management environment. • Provide a framework and implementation assistance for the establishment of new project offices. 118 Creating the Project Office At 3M they developed an internal document called the Project Office Im- plementation Kit, which helps new offices get going. The POIK, as it is affec- tionately known, is a compilation, synthesis, and distillation of many PM industry books and articles that have been written about project offices. It is an attempt to boil all available information down to the essence of what future (and current, for that matter) project leaders need to know to get their offices defined and imple- mented. It also serves as a reference to help them sustain their efforts. The on- going update of this document is also handled through the Project Office Forum so it always stays in touch with what is currently needed. Here are a few examples of what the POIK contains and how it is being used: The first section simply tries to clarify what a project office is (or could be) and how it can benefit the organization. It also points out that not all POs are created equal—they can exist at a number of levels in the organization and can scale their services across a wide range of activities. Many people at 3M use this section to introduce the PO concept to their organizations, and if they cannot get their basic understanding and buy-in from this, then they realize that they are not ready to launch a PO yet. The second and third sections explore the range of functions and services a PO could pro- vide and how these services manifest themselves. Organizations have used these two sec- tions in various ways, for example, as a service check against what they do now to see if they are providing an adequate level of service for the kind of office they are, or to help in defining the services their new office will try to provide. The crit- ical thing these sections offer, in addition, is to clarify what roles are appropriate for the PO to play, as opposed to the actual project leaders and managers in the organization. It is important to note that at 3M, in most areas, project leaders do not reside in the project office itself, they remain in their functional areas. The fourth and fifth sections of the POIK deal with how to plan, design, and implement a chosen level of project office. These are the newest and least proven sections of the doc- ument. Many offices have enough baseline information to proceed with their own plans after applying the first several sections of the POIK. These sections have been very helpful for offices that want more detailed support about doing needs analysis, determining levels of readiness, and actually laying out office plans. This document is still a work in progress; it will change as the prevailing busi- ness environment changes. The next edition will focus more on the sustaining mechanisms and metrics existing offices can use to report on their impact to the organization in which they reside. Futures for PM Converts As more people and organizations come into the PM fold, Storeygard offers some words of advice he thinks will take the movement to new heights: “The more that project offices and project leaders can prove that their efforts contribute not only Tell the Tale 119 to the bottom-line profits of an organization but also to the top line in the way that efforts are selected and managed, the more respect and positional power they will have. This will require much better metrics and reporting on paybacks for PM investments to sustain and promote further PM rollouts in the future.” At 3M, people are beginning to see increased creation and use of project dashboards that inform organizations of their project and program progress. Many 3M project offices are now actively involved in helping divisions set up bal- anced scorecards, to monitor their organizations. However, Storeygard advises, “One man’s metric is another man’s chaff. Your metrics are your metrics, so de- termine what is critical to the success of your business and focus there!” Enter- prise PM tools are now also getting much more consideration and use at 3M than in the past, despite their substantial cost. Part of the challenge for project offices and PM rollouts in organizations re- mains, however, to find more and varied ways to engage middle and top level management, not only in supporting PM efforts but in helping these managers walk the talk themselves as the very future of their discipline moves more toward project and program realms. Storeygard predicts that management’s ability to not only support PM but also practice it will be key to future business success. Many of 3M’s more successful business unit leaders are now seeing their roles much more in terms of being project portfolio managers. They also are beginning to re- alize that if PM is perceived as “only good for the troops under them,” then their success will be limited. Good PM needs to be practiced up and down the entire organization to be truly successful. As project offices mature, they must also recognize the need to acquire new skills themselves to remain relevant. And one of the best ways to do that is to get involved with benchmarking and collegial relationships with other companies and associations actively involved in the furtherance of the discipline of PM (PMI, PDMA, IEEE, to name a few). The minute a project office feels it has its act to- gether and knows all it needs to know, stagnation sets in. As with most innovative organizations, the 3M groups need to be continually infused with new ideas and be informed by current and critical business needs and issues to remain relevant. They have tried several organizational models designed to accomplish this. In the case where the project office is in the line organization and does not have project leaders within the office, but distributed out in their functional areas, the project leaders themselves bring real-world cutting-edge per- spectives. The other prevalent model used within corporate staff environments is to periodically circulate project office personnel out into the line organizations for projects or even short to mid-term assignments (anywhere from six months to be- tween three and five years) to get line experience that can then be brought back into the staff organization. Both these models enable the project office perspec- tive to remain fresh and aligned to current business needs. 120 Creating the Project Office Bob Storeygard is currently on one of those line assignments in Traffic Con- trol Materials. He says, “Once we proved the worth of project management, I’m getting an avalanche of business, firing on all cylinders!” Epilogue: How Does the Project Office Fit In with Major Organizational Change? Finally, a few thoughts on how the project office movement can contribute to the company in the midst of major organizational change. Organizations face many initiatives that come about as a result of business circumstances, such as quality programs, regulatory requirements, and industry issues. The introduction and institutionalization of Six Sigma at 3M is one example. Six Sigma has been infused at 3M on a grand scale and has brought many solid quality and measurement techniques and tools more into the forefront than ever be- fore. Although the movement does contain noticeable aspects of project manage- ment, it focuses more on the hard side of PM—tools, deliverables including charters and control plans, and technical road maps—than it does on the soft side topics of team formation, conflict resolution, reporting, and communication. This is where the project office helps supplement and strengthen Six Sigma projects, as well as helping existing PM components to be more robust. Six Sigma is an initiative that is not going to go away. It is now a part of daily and ongoing corporate life at 3M, so the PM infrastructure will need to continue to help foster, sustain, and enhance its adoption. As new corporate initiatives are implemented in response to changing busi- ness climates and economic times, a committed PM environment will continue to support those initiatives by espousing and following a few commonsense practices: • Take a lesson from Robert Greenleaf ’s Web site (http://www.greenleaf.org) and exhibit a “servant leadership” attitude. This seeming oxymoron, in a PM context, means to 3M that project offices should always be prepared to help and equip someone else to shine, whether a manager, project leader, or other colleague. • The efforts of the project office must be additive, not obstructionist. PO staff take the good ideas they find as they work with organizations and help aug- ment those ideas with solid PM practices, rather than imposing a set of regu- lations on the groups they are supposed to be assisting. • The adept project office is always ready to meet a new challenge by being flex- ible and ready, but not directive. People look to project offices for skillful help as well as connections and networking, and the PO staff need to be prepared to offer both. Tell the Tale 121 • Cooperate with those seeking the project office’s help, especially if they are making a good-faith effort to learn and adopt new practices. Eventually this will develop the kind of reputation that will encourage others to seek the project office out for help. By following this sort of road map to establish and harness PM support within the 3M organization, project offices will continue to have an undeniable and last- ing positive effect on the company. Author Comments The 3M case is an example of a bottom-up, internal group implementation ef- fort where many suggestions from the first four chapters were applied. The clear danger was the identified and focused pain in the organization. The PM advo- cates began to add value by focusing first on current problem areas and provid- ing specific help to solve them using PM-related techniques. Internal assessments created even more clarity—people could finally see the real causes behind many of their organizational woes. A powerful guiding coalition was seen in the execu- tive sponsorship group and the Project Management Special Interest Group Steer- ing Committee. To help the team stay focused they prepared a model of what success would look like, the PM Maturity Model. They were able to start small, helping people apply tools such as methodolo- gies and project charters, then move to project manager training. They created a groundswell of PM practitioners throughout 3M by getting them to rally to the PMSIG as a group that could actually effect change. Later they developed project management sponsors, encouraged a project manager career path, and began portfolio assessment services. Communications were effective. PMSIG members had some successes and others began to ask for assistance. It was helpful to set up Web sites and publish their competency model and PM curriculum. In addition, the Project Manage- ment Temple works well as a one-page executive summary on the components of a good project environment. A good example of consolidating wins to promote more change appeared in the distribution of the framework for implementation of a new project office, the Project Office Implementation Kit. The 3M case illustrates the one-step-at-a-time approach to implementing the project office, beginning with the need to assess the value to the organization of instituting the PO concept, and to see if enough accumulated pain exists in the company for stakeholders to recognize a need for help. It was decided at 3M not 122 Creating the Project Office to plunge immediately into creating a formal organization, but rather to use more subtle approaches involving temporary support and stealth missions aimed at re- solving pending challenges and at the same time demonstrating the benefit of project management. Further steps, in an articulated political approach, were taken to strengthen the project management cause. These included launching the PMSIG, identifying PM champions, creating a PM curriculum, and developing maturity and project leadership models. Once the basics were in place, the group of PM change agents perceived the need to spread the word, that is, to do marketing on the topics of project office and project management. Through the PMSIG, 3M project practitioners were brought together for the first time. PM education and networking opportunities were also made readily available and visible. PM best practices were gathered. More information began being disseminated. People given project leadership po- sitions, such as technicians, could realize a whole new career path in project man- agement. The PMSIG leadership created a new and significant realization among management ranks that project management is a viable career path. Potential pilot projects and programs using more explicit project management techniques were undertaken. Periodically the movement was reinvented to keep it fresh, relevant, and vis- ible. To do this, assessments were applied to determine the organization’s re- quirements. After the assessments were completed, rollout plans were made for the distribution, training, and implementation of various PM techniques, tools, and methods. Project offices serve as a mechanism to keep activities on track. Storeygard also evangelizes for a stronger link between project decisions and for translating them into business success, formulating a balanced scorecard set of metrics as suggested by Cohen and Graham (2001) and covered further in Chap- ter Ten. As project offices mature, they need to get involved with benchmarking projects and networking relationships with other companies and associations. Project of- fices can also contribute to the company during major organizational change. As ambassador and caretaker of project management applications and techniques, the project office can make significant contributions in virtually all organizational settings. The recurring theme is to continually harness internal support. Tell the Tale 123 PART TWO MAKING CHANGE HAPPEN I n this part of the book, the emphasis changes from planning to doing. The first part was concerned mainly with creating conditions so that change could hap- pen. Entering this part it is assumed that many of those conditions are in place. Now it is time for the project office team to make contact with those people in the organization who must actually carry out the planned changes. It is an accepted military dictum that “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” The mem- bers of the organization are not enemies in the classic sense, of course, but they can be expected to respond in ways that are not expected, not planned, or not even imagined. From this we can construct a parallel organizational change dic- tum: “No change plan ever survives contact with the members of the organiza- tion for whom the change is planned.” The following observations will ease the transition: • Be flexible—a plan is a metaphor, not a law. Treat the organizational change plan you have developed as a guide to behavior and not as an imperative. This is the essential idea behind another accepted military dictum: “A plan is noth- ing, but planning is everything.” • Beware—things may go too easily at first. Change agent teams often report that initial efforts meet with quick acceptance. This often instills a false sense of security, an idea that things will continue without much resistance. However, what it usually means is that the opposition has been caught off guard. It is Y easy to prevail until the opposition gets organized. An example of this is the “hundred days” that new presidents have to actually make some changes, until the opposition in Congress gets organized. • Be alert—unforeseen opposition could arise at any moment, and it may go well beyond verbal resistance. We now enter the middle section of Figure I.1, where the beasts come out of the jungle in response to invaders. For example, the sec- ond case study in this part discusses a runway repaving project that was delayed because a group with a political agenda backed up by sledge hammers de- stroyed some crucial equipment. • Be ready—you will need to improvise and make changes in the plan to adapt it to reality. Remember that you have three choices for every step in the plan. First, you can exit that step, leave it if it does not seem to be working. The sec- ond choice is to modify that step, making change based on the reality encoun- tered. The third choice is to push on if the step seems to be working, even if not quite as planned. The basic plan that has been suggested so far is to find a small project that is in trouble, show how standard project management methods can help the project, generate a win from this project, and then use that win to develop legitimacy and move on to larger projects. However, this may not be possible. The project office team may suddenly find themselves involved in a huge, highly visible, bet-the-com- pany type project. This case requires a radically different approach, an obvious change in plan. Some suggest that to develop broad-based actions toward a project office should begin with project manager training and then develop expertise so it can eventually help in project portfolio management. However, it may be that assisting in portfolio management is the first task that the project office members are as- signed. Again, a change in plan would be needed. The basic theme here is that contact with the organization can often result in situations that seem chaotic. Given the uncertainty involved in organizational re- sponses, it is not easy in a book to present an organized approach to responding to chaotic situations. As a result, the reader may experience this section as a bit chaotic itself as we present a series of organizational situations and the responses of the project office teams. Chapter Six presents some structure to help understanding by giving creative and flexible ways to manage chaos, manage complexity, assist in project portfolio management, and generally operate in an organizational environment. This is fol- lowed by two wide-ranging case studies of project office implementation. The first example is in a high-tech office environment and illustrates the evolution of a project office within a business organization. This example shows the typical life 126 Creating the Project Office cycle of a project office; it follows a process much like that outlined in Part One of this book. The second example is from a U.S. Air Force base in Italy. This ex- ample is a bit more chaotic as a project office was created to help make sense of a large, multiproject construction program. This example also shows how a project office can work with a coalition of organizations where the only thing constant was the construction site. The examples are then followed by Chapter Nine, which uses lessons from the case studies to suggest techniques for staffing and operating the project office. Part Two: Making Change Happen 127 . assistance for the establishment of new project offices. 118 Creating the Project Office At 3M they developed an internal document called the Project Office. introduce the PO concept to their organizations, and if they cannot get their basic understanding and buy-in from this, then they realize that they are