PMO Skills

Taking Effective Meeting Notes

A large part of the role of the PMO is supporting communications and the exchange of information that regularly happens in projects, programmes and portfolios. One of the most common supporting roles is the one the PMO provides in meetings and regardless of what level of PMO professional you are or what context you work in, you will be required to take effective notes. Yet many of us working in PMOs are probably expected to just get on with it and receive minimal training or guidance. In this extended article, we take you through to process and provide guidance and practical tips on becoming an ace note taker.
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PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management – Conflict Management

If there is one thing we can expect from working in project management it's conflict. Due to the nature of projects - working to provide a solution to something we've probably never done before will mean there are problems to solve; people to bring onside; teams to work together and any number of expectations to be met. Believe it or not, some conflict is good and helps us uncover answers to problems that enable the project to move on and be delivered successfully. Over the next few weeks, we are going to cover 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 also share ten different things your PMO can be thinking about to make a real difference to the performance of your PMO. We're going to look at the following areas: servant leadership; facilitation, coaching and; conflict management. In this second article of our PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management series, we take a look at conflict management.
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PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management – Servant Leadership

Modern project management has been mainly focused on the different methods and delivery approaches for managing projects and programmes. Waterfall, Lean, SCRUM, Kanban, Agile – the list goes on. Utilising the right approach for the right project is key, yet the biggest success factor for successful projects remains the same – effective leadership and management of people in project environments. Over the next few weeks we are going to cover 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 also share ten different things your PMO can be thinking about to make a real difference to the performance of your PMO. We're going to look at the following areas: servant leadership; facilitation, coaching and; conflict management. This article covers the first, servant leadership.
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Emotional and Personal Intelligence for PMO Professionals

You’re likely familiar with Emotional Intelligence (EI), a constellation of abilities that allows us to make good decisions when confronted with emotional information. Recent studies into non-cognitive space, however, suggest that EI is not really sufficient to predict the tremendous variation in responses we observe when people have to make these decisions. Through laboratory work, we’ve come to learn that motivational competencies are just as important to these outcomes as emotional ones. They’re very different from one another, however, and so need to be measured independently. We’ve also come to recognize that the skills needed to experience emotions in ourselves is fundamentally and subjectively different from the ability to interpret these same emotions in other people. It’s because of these observations that the measurement of non-cognitive competencies has been redesigned
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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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PMO Music to Our Ears

Every so often it's good to take a sideways view at PMO - think differently, a bit of lateral thinking, that kind of thing. During the pandemic on the weekly #PMOwfh sessions, we liked to throw in a few different things and in this article, it was all about what we can learn from music. So sit back whilst we bring wedding singers, jazz bands, Roger Daltrey and Elvis to the PMO context and hopefully give you a little food for thought - or music to your ears.
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Emerging from Lockdown with PMO Flashmob

In this session, we turned once again to the more personal side of the effects of the lockdown and we were really pleased to have Sharon De Mascia join us. Sharon is the author of a book I love - Project Psychology - so I naturally thought of her when looking for someone to talk to us about the effects of lockdown on the workplace and people.
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Soft Skills and the PMO Practitioner

In the last webinar we did, there was a question about soft skills and PMO practitioners today. You can see the webinar [here] The session was abot maturity - getting better at what the PMO does as well as the need for the organisation to mature in the way it delivers its programmes and projects too. An obvious part of that is how we, as PMO practitioners, also view maturity in the way we work - not just the 'hard skills' stuff but also how we behave and work with others - the soft skills stuff. The four soft skills pulled out of the session - communication; storytelling; stakeholder management and leadership - were just the presenter's view. I decided to share it in a post on Linkedin and see what others [came up with too] We've also pulled together a few others from recent PMO Flashmob conversations too. What do you reckon? What's missing? Why not add your comments below or join the conversation stream over on Linkedin.  
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