This week I went along to an APM Branch meeting to hear Lain Burgos-Lovece talking about PMOs. I’ve known Lain for a number of years through his work at the PMOSIG and it’s always good to hear people talking about a subject they’ve really mastered and are of course passionate about.
In this session about PMO Optimisation, Lain shared some simple – but effective – insights into how PMOs can raise their maturity and extract more value from their current services without additional costs in resources.
The examples given by Lain in the session were the lessons learnt process, dependency management and portfolio decisions. In this post I’m just going to cover the insights from lessons learnt.
Judging by the audience reaction, lessons learnt for most people just means ‘lessons recorded’ and then put away and forgotten about. The PMO’s role is to turn lessons learnt into actionable stuff that improves future project and organisation performance. And this is the key really – it’s the organisation that learns not just the project.
Using a simple idea of KISS (not Keep it Simple Stupid) but Keep – Improve – Start – Stop, lessons from the projects and programmes first need turning into categories so they become more manageable and understood. For example, lessons or themes that are uncovered can fit into categories such as governance issues; structure or leadership. The PMO is then responsible for finding patterns within the themes. The real value is the debate that these patterns lead to – and surely this is where we should be spending most of our time in the initial process – all those collective brains debating what these patterns are trying to tell us.
Once the patterns begin to emerge, it’s the decisions around what to Keep – Improve – Start – Stop that lead to real action. The outcomes should keep the PMO, project practitioners and the organisation busy as they focused on the areas of improvement needed; start to develop new things and stop the things that don’t work. In an ideal world there will always be more Keeps than Stops – a good sign of a maturing organisation.
The interesting thing for me is just how simple a way forward this is with the lessons learnt process – how to get what we’ve learnt – both good and bad back into the place where it matters the most – the organisation. It’s not just about creating a report which 9 times out of 10 won’t be looked at again by anyone but about action. Embedding lessons learnt into existing organisational processes is just one way for the PMO to help raise the maturity of delivery in a business.
Lain Burgos-Lovece
Just one final thought from the presentation – what do you think is the simplest definition a PMO could have? It reduces uncertainty, simple but effective eh?
