PMO Services

Lessons Learnt About Lessons Learnt

According to the poll taken during this session on Lessons Learnt About Lessons Learnt, only 50% of projects in our participant's organisations have a lessons learnt approach as part of their project management delivery methods. Personally, I was surprised at how low that was. You can't deny that learning lessons from everything we do - in our own lives as well as at work - just makes sense. Taking the time to think about and reflect on how we've done something - whether that's successful or not - should mean we come at a similar or related challenge in the future just that little bit wiser about how we'll tackle it. Projects and project management are ripe for insights and little nuggets that help smooth the path for future projects - after all, the methods and ways of working in project management have all come from someone's previous lessons on what has worked and what definitely hasn't. In this PMO Flashmob session about Lessons Learnt, we heard from PMO professional Ken Burrell. Ken is passionate about Lessons Learnt, so much so he wrote a book on it -Learning Lessons from Projects: How it works, why it goes wrong, and how you can do it better - so who better to help PMO professionals understand more about what we can be doing to better support our organisations in this area of Knowledge Management.
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PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management – Facilitation

With Excerpt - One of the main objectives of a PMO is to support and enable effective decision-making. It's such a great objective because there's a lot of scope with how the PMO can do that. From creating reports, giving insights from data, supporting stakeholder engagement activities and the part we can play when people come together to solve problems, make decisions and take action. In this article, we take a closer look at facilitation skills. Within P3O it states that "the P3O is ideally placed to provide an independent facilitation role" and we totally agree with that. Over the last few weeks we have already covered several different frameworks, approaches and techniques that the modern project practitioner can utilise in their day-to-day work that make a difference to people and their performance levels. We have also shared ten different things your PMO can be thinking about to make a real difference to the performance of your PMO. We've already looked at the following areas: servant leadership; facilitation, coaching and; conflict management. In this final article of our PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management series, we take a look at facilitation.
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PMO – Carrot or Stick?

Have you heard it been said about the PMO that they fall into two camps, carrot or stick? On last week's session about the Sponsors and the PMO (full video etc ready soon), it was mention in relation to how the PMO can work with sponsors, and in the picture to the right, that was pulled from a session we did about lessons learnt a while back. Apart from being able to draw nice pictures of carrots and sticks, what does it really mean? Ultimately it's all about punishment-and-reward motivational techniques, just like with children, we reward when they do something they should do and remove privileges when they don't. Originally applying to animals, it describes whether to get it to move by enticing the animal with a nice juicy carrot in front of it as a reward, or beating it with a stick. Getting the animal to move is the objective or target, and the carrot and stick are a means of achieving it. BCF Group Carrot or Stick? Management is already full of anecdotes about using "carrot and stick" as a means to motivate people, and whilst many think it conjures up a terrible image, you can't deny that it's memorable and certainly sparks conversation, debate and ideas. So what does it mean in the PMO context?
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Revisiting PMO Service Catalogues

We revisit the PMO Service Catalogue on the #PMOwfh session. If you've not already seen the previous one, we really recommend you check it out before taking a look at the latest session. In the previous session, we got into the what is a service catalogue, what you can expect to find in it etc We also introduced the new book on PMO Service Catalogues as well In this session, we wanted to see what you had to say about them. Do you use them? If not, why not? If you do, what value do they bring?  
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PMO Services for Agile and Waterfall Projects

Many PMOs do not have the luxury of focussing solely on Waterfall or Agile projects. Their challenge is to evolve their service offering to support the Waterfall projects, whilst juggling an increasing number of Agile projects in the portfolio. During this session, John McIntyre of HotPMO will discuss how PMOs can rise to the challenge and become delivery heroes!
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The Adaptive PMO

In this article we take a look at the adaptive PMO - how we support different approaches to delivery; the service-based PMO and the automated PMO
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PMO Lab: Services

PMO Labs is our way of getting attendees talking about different PMO themes together. We know that every single one of the PMO Flashmobbers has a story to share, an interesting insight from their careers that others would get a great benefit from. In this PMO Lab, part of the session held at Parliament UK, we continued to look at the insights thrown up from the latest Inside PMO report on KPIs, Metrics and Measures. This time around we were talking about metrics around a PMO service menu - service levels or SLAs. We started by confirming what a service menu is. Basically, this is a list of all the services that the PMO can perform - the most well-known version of this is Appendix F of the P3O manual.
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