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The best way to keep stakeholders involved is to be smart about their time. Prohaska serves as the lone PMO employee and taps company executives to serve as her board. For these meetings, she invites the CFO, COO, vice president and general manager of domestic sales, vice president of international sales, vice president of global manufacturing, and representatives from a couple of primary business partners. Prior to every meeting, she sends out a detailed agenda that contains the information the board cares about, not technical jargon. For instance, one of WAI Global's projects is to replace a feature-deficient older release of Lotus Notes with a global e-mail system standardized on Outlook and Exchange. "They want to know when we're going to get there," Prohaska says.
Before a meeting, committee members are expected to review proposed project charters so they can discuss them and make decisions. They are also responsible for knowing about and approving various project requests within their departments, as well as justifying and prioritizing those requests. Project milestones require formal presentations at the meetings.
"They have to be prepared with answers for anything their name is on," Prohaska says. Prohaska even follows up with people who miss a meeting with a phone call. "The biggest challenge is getting people to make the time," Prohaska says. "It's got to be worth it for people to show up every month. So be prepared with an agenda, and make sure the subject matter is important."
Leaders Born and Made
Executives aren't the only ones who need to buy into the PMO concept. Liza Luna, program manager of IT at $558-million Keystone Automotive Industries Inc., heads the PMO at the parts distributor in Pomona, Calif., She uses Mercury Interactive software to update projects and give the vice president of IT a bird's-eye view of the project portfolio. And while executives are on board, there are dissenters, and they're hardly the group Luna expected: IT developers.
"Getting the IT side of the house to champion this has been, surprisingly, a bit of a struggle," Luna says. Software developers are already up to their necks in documentation duties, she explains, and thus react negatively to a PMO they perceive as ordering them to duplicate efforts. So she has tried to show how the PMO makes IT employees' jobs easier. If a PMO seeks to warm IT folks to the concept, the worst thing it can do is become a watchdog for business execs. "Don't get a reputation among project managers that you're the auditor," Rockwell Automation's Jackson warns. "You'll end up in big trouble."
All of which points to the importance of having a multitalented person lead the PMO. The PMO leader must have strong IT project management and communication skills in order to converse with project managers and IT people. And the leader needs business skills as well as some chutzpah to work with business execs. Too often midmarket CIOs promote their top project manager to be the PMO leader, says Jose Marroig, an executive and consultant at PSG. And while that person may be good at delivering projects on time and on budget, "are they really politically savvy within an organization to make things happen?"
At Insurance House, Golden's unsuccessful predecessors may have lacked some of those qualities. "I'm not sure the individuals were comfortable enough or had the relationship with the business side to push back," Golden says. Success requires having enough "bully authority" to mandate practices, tool choices and procedures, he notes. WAI's Prohaska saw firsthand such toughness at a former employer, a $4-billion financial institution where the PMO leader kicked out a project manager from the PMO.
"The project manager was removed essentially because he wasn't able to manage [a multi-site] project and ensure that deliverables were being met on track with the plan," recalls Prohaska. "The resources assigned to the largest site were not competent to do the work. He did not address the problem until close to the deliverable date for that phase, which put the project behind schedule and had budget impacts."
Observation and intuition are also important. "The people reporting [to] the PMO only tell you the good stuff," she says. "But it has to feel right. If everyone is giving the green light and you're not seeing certain things happen, something should tell you that you're not getting full disclosure."
Training also has a place. Though GMAC's Fetsick had been with GMAC for more than a decade when she was promoted to PMO leader, she underwent some serious training in preparation for her new role. She earned a Project Management Professional (PMP) certificate from the well-known Project Management Institute and an MBA.
"Put someone in charge that you trust," says Nicole Chestang, GMAC's COO and Fetsick's boss. "The head of our PMO has been with the organization for 10 years, five of which were in IT. She has a broad understanding of our business."
Lastly, a PMO leader should know how to build on the momentum of a successful PMO -- perhaps even expanding its scope outside IT.
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