The Practice of planning and the PMO, John Barben

The practice of planning and the PMO 26th June 2013

John Barben exsto portfolio services

supporting

Practice vs process

• There are 8 white and 5 black keys on a piano – from which you can play all music – if you practice

• Mastery of any practical skill takes 10,000 hours – that’s 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for nearly 10 years

Have you heard a good story?

• Plans are stories

• Good stories have a structure

• You can teach people how to tell good stories

Plans are stories

• Stories convey meaning and purpose

• Listeners want to believe in stories

• Stories need to be pitched at the right level for the audience

Project genre reflects planning practice

VOLATILE

STATIC

COMPLICATED / KNOWN

COMPLEX / UNKNOWN

Long term detailed plans Planning horizon > 2 years

Estimates of duration and resource based on experience e.g. VSEL

Detailed plan for short term Operational horizon < 6 months Aspirational plan for longer term

Planning horizon > 2 years e.g. DLR resignalling

“Agile” iterations contained within short duration project stages

A mix of “service” and “agile” to increase proportion of certainty

e.g. large software development

Detailed planning with a high degree of risk management – supplier risk Use of 3PE and Monte Carlo

e.g. MoD CADMID

Scheduling - different strokes ANSI 748 32 EV Guidelines

• WBS

• Integrate Subsystems

• Schedule work

• Time-phased budget

• Limit LoE

• Maintain the baseline

• Assign responsibility at Cost Account level

• Calculate performance, forecast and establish variance

• Manager Action Plans

GAO Schedule Assessment Guide

• WBS

• Integrated Master Schedule

• Critical path and complete schedules

• Short activities, joined by critical path, accurate durations

• Schedule risk analysis (Monte Carlo)

• Rigorous rules for progressing a schedule

• Maintain a baseline

PRINCE2

• Product Breakdown Structure and Product Flow Diagrams

• Activities, dependencies and estimates

• Establishing a budget

• Project, Stage, Team plans

• Stage management

• Exception plans

• Project closure

• Business Case

What has the PMO ever done for us?

• “...but apart from the reporting service, the centralised training, the process documentation, the assurance, document control, common approaches to planning and resourcing, baseline configuration control, estimating norms, independent baseline reviews and business case support

• ... what has the PMO ever done for us?”

Exercise

• Split into syndicates and map your own experience onto these pictures

• Volatile vs. Static

• Complex & Unknown vs. Complicated & Known





Good stories have a structure

• There are many genres of story

• The structure supports the story you want to tell

• Genre defines the content and the structure of the story

PMO options

FACILITATING CONTROLLING

TRANSFORMATIVE

STABILISING

PORTFOLIO OFFICE ENTERPRISE

TRANSFORMATION

REPORTING SERVICE RESOURCE SUPPLY PMO

Align portfolio of projects to corporate strategy and priorities

For use in significant. centralised transformation of the whole enterprise

Provide aggregation of portfolio of projects including analysis and recommendations

Provide staffing for projects and local PMOs to make the most efficient use of project

management resource

Virgin Atlantic Airways

MoD IPT

A major Government department

Compliance vs Agility – different stories

– Nuclear – safety cases – gate based Go/No Go

– Pharmaceutical – sequence of trials – heavy legislative burden

– Government Business Case reviews – by Whitehall and Major Projects Authority

– Web gaming - release competitive features – survival of the fittest

Practice in scheduling

• Consequential impact of slippage

• Planning horizons – aspirational planning – rolling wave

• Local practice vs. central practice

• Top down vs bottom up

• Designing an Enterprise WBS

• Agile vs. Waterfall

What can go wrong?

Over planning – takes away the management responsibility

Submarine maintenance

Too little focus on responsibility for delivery Not delegating budget and scope in MoD EV project

No critical path 500+ individual small projects in software development – Banking

How can the PMO help?

• Provide consistency – whatever the agreed methodology

• Establish the minimum standard for aggregation • Build and maintain the Enterprise Project Structure • Building, maintaining, and progressing the master

schedule • Maintain the WBS • Produce aggregated and analytical reporting • Support scenario planning / what-ifs

Practice in governance

• Governance of Project Management (APM Knowledge)

– Corporate governance that is specifically related to project activities. Effective governance of project management ensures that an organisation’s project portfolio is aligned to the organisation's objectives, is delivered efficiently and is sustainable”

What activities fall under “governance”?

• Governance is sometimes understood as the “rules by which the game is played” and sometimes as “playing by the rules”

– Levels of authority / decision rights

– Sponsoring groups, executives, boards (PRINCE2)

– Post Implementation Reviews on Business Cases

Governance stories

• Big governance – MoD Initial Gate / Main Gate – big investment, big

governance

• The wrong kind of governance

– Wild swings in capital requirements – GoCo – VOWD calculations in PMO system becomes auditable –

utilities – Drawdown of schedule contingency related to risk log –

A&D


• Make sure that projects “play by the rules”

– Embed the rules within the reporting layer

– Establish gated process – reduce volatility

– Map the planned work to the strategy layer / investment portfolio

– Assure policy and procedure compliance by establishing repeatable measures

– Independent Baseline Reviews

Practice in Matrix management High technical specialisation

Flexible skills deployment

Focus on efficiency

Focus on schedule

Coordination matrix Large software house – may lead to queuing – requires more transactional approach to planning

Secondment matrix Capital intensive major projects – may lead to holding on to resource – separate plan for resource assignments

Functional departments Plans and commitments built into annual business unit planning

Service management Demand –side planning (sales order plan) drives demand on services


• Reporting the workload

• Facilitating the workflow (production control)

• Maintaining accurate location information on resources and their workload

• Manage resource booking process

• Manage timesheets

• Managing transfers (transfer window?)

Exercise

• Identify your matrix organisation and whether it works

• Think about the types of schedules that you have implemented and how they connect





You can teach people to tell good stories

• Listen to good storytellers and how they tell their stories

• It’s hard to tell a story that you don't believe in

• Good storytellers make the listener part of the story

Range of PM practice (style)

• Shepherd vs. sheepdog

• Evidence –based vs. “it’s all in my head”

• Shouty and reactive vs. planful and considered

• Control freak / single point of failure

Who are the best planners?

• Domain-specific expertise is helpful but generic skills apply

• Outage planning – petrochem / rail • Complicated event – Olympics • Earned Value governed projects – defence /

aerospace • Master planners – software development • Make-to-order manufacturing – infrastructure • Long-term infrastructure projects

Practice

Practice

• Is personal

– In most professions we expect basic competency after 3 years

• Can be shared

– has to be received from a trusted source

– requires “situational learning”

• Is as flexible as the practitioner chooses to allow

• Takes time to develop (“time-served”)

Process

• Process sets the minimum standard

• Provides the opportunity to measure project (or process?) performance

• Slow to react to change – updates and localisation are expensive

• Projects react to uncertainty – process tries to remove uncertainty

Characteristics of CoPs

Cf. Hildreth, Kimble & Wright 1998

Communicating Situated Learning

Sense of Community Participation with

others

Common language

Common purpose

Evolution

Shared background /

experience

Dynamism

Creation of new knowledge

Not simply social interaction

Hierarchy of PjM knowledge

Adapted from

Maslow's Hierarchy of

Needs

Biological and Physiological needs Information about project plan, progress, scope

Safety needs Risk Management, Project Assurance, Quality Plans, Quality Control

Cognitive needs Participation in discussion forums, capture and re-use of

knowledge for other projects

Esteem needs

online reputation building, blogging, recognition of contribution / scoring

Belongingness needs Sharing knowledge, co-authoring, chat, project home pages, online presence

Self-actualisation Community participation, coaching

Transcendence Community of Practice leadership,

becoming a coach

Collaboration

Communities of Practice





Thank you

• John Barben

• [email protected]

• www.exsto.co.uk

• Jon Street

• [email protected]