At last month's PMO Flashmob held at QA there were a couple of handouts that caught my attention and I thought they would be worth sharing. They were both QA materials and before you say I've gone all salesy on you, read on and find out why I thought they were worth sharing.
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In this session we take a look at one of the main challenge areas for PMOs right now - how to support hybrid delivery.
It was an interactive session to help us really understand what the challenge is - and what the PMO can do to overcome the issues and really support their organisations going forward.
Sign in to read more about supporting Agile and Waterfall projects - to balance our portfolios - or is it even about projects anymore.
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In this summer series we take a look at the challenges of low maturity. That could be low maturity of PPM, the PMO or the organisation. Find out what challenges PMOs are facing and how they're overcoming them.
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Megaprojects tend to be over the £1 billion mark in terms of budget and are often under great scrutiny - not just because of the politics but because many of these projects are investment projects - for communities, cities or countries. They also tend to take a long time to deliver, over years, decades and many organisations who run them - their project departments are huge in terms of the people working on them, and the third-parties and customers involved.
Read on to find out what the PMO can learn from megaprojects
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PMI's Body of Knowledge is now available as Edition 7. We take a look at the changes and specifically what the BoK says about PMOs. PMOs are part of the system of value delivery - find out more about what that means.
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It's always good to find out what the latest insights are from research papers based on PMO themes. In this article we take a look at the paper, The Role Played by PMOs in the Transfer of Knowledge Between Projects from the Department of Engineering and Technology Management, University of Pretoria, South Africa published in 2018.
The paper presents a conceptual framework with the promise of further research to come which will look at the empirical results (the realities).
The argument is that projects are focused on the short-term goals, and rightly so, however, we can learn lessons and gain knowledge from carrying out these projects that should benefit the long-term goals of the organisation. The argument is old - how can we really learn the lessons of previous projects to help us deliver future projects better.
The paper presents the PMO as being the function ideally placed within an organisation to play an important role in supporting and facilitating the flow of knowledge between projects. The PMO can be seen as a catalyst - interestingly there are three definitions of catalyst that could all apply, you choose:
something that causes activity between two or more persons or forces without itself being affected.
a person or thing that precipitates an event or change.
a person whose talk, enthusiasm, or energy causes others to be more friendly, enthusiastic, or energetic.
The PMO acts as a catalyst that moderate and mediate the transfer of knowledge between projects. In the rest of the article, we take a look at the role of the PMO in moderating and mediating plus take a deeper look at the research findings.
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We've talked about this a lot at PMO Flashmob - coaching skills.
Skills we could be using to better support those we work within the delivery organisation - skills we could be using within the PMO itself to increase performance and maturity.
We've talked about the differences between mentoring and coaching - we've also talked about being skilled to coach others.
There is one thing we've agreed on over the years, using different coaching skills is one way for the PMO to really help people deliver projects and programmes more successfully - yet equally, we're perhaps not as qualified to do it as we should be.
You can check out some previous sessions like Coaching in All Directions - Coaching Skills for PMO Professionals and Using a Coaching Model in the PMO.
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 third article of our PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management series, we take a look at coaching.
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