In July 2020, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), a government organisation, released a white paper which focused on eight principles, "a quick guide for practitioners on things to get right for any project to succeed"
The IPA is the UK government’s centre of expertise for infrastructure and major projects and is aligned with the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
If you've not seen the paper, take a look at it here. We were specifically interested in what the principles for project success are and take another look at the PMO Principles in light of them. The challenge for PMOs is also how to embed and ingrain these principles within our organisations.
The Infrastructure and Projects Authority’s (IPA) have an initiative called Project X.
Project X is
a vehicle to engage contemporary research in project and programme with the ‘real-world’ issues that are manifest across the Government’s Major Project Portfolio (GMPP). Project X is ambitious, it seeks to promote and support methodologically rigorous research that is firmly grounded in clear pathways to impact – with an ultimate ambition of delivering savings for the project delivery and enhancing project management capability across government departments and industry.
As part of the initiative, different organisations are taking part and making contributions, the Association for Project Management (APM) is one of them and a recent report called Developing the Practice of Governance - was released.
The report focuses on how project practitioners could improve governance on their projects and of course, that's a subject that should interest any PMO practitioner too.
As part of the weekly #PMOwfh session, we had one of the authors of that report join us. It sparked some really interesting and new insights which we think you'll enjoy exploring too.
Let's get started
Throughout the lockdown period on our Wednesday afternoon #PMOwfh sessions we have been hearing about PMO practitioner's situations - some furloughed; some with contracts cancelled; others working at home and some securing new roles.
In the early days I think most of us would agree that there wasn't any clear picture about what was happening or what to expect in terms of our futures.
Last week we had a session with John Thorpe of Arras Peeople - the Project Management Recruitment Specialists - and he gave us a great overview of what's happened to the marketplace and what we can expect going forward.
In this latest recording you'll see the session from John plus our poll; a short sessions on different modes of working as a PMO practitioner and there's some specific insights into PMO recruitment too.
Check out the article where PMO Flashmob gets a mentioned amongst all the project management stuff in the latest Project Management campaign from Media Planet which went out in the Sunday Telegraph on the 9th September.
Take a look at There's Never Been a Better Time to Work in a PMO and Building a PMO Career.
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.
In January's PMO Flashmob we had Susanne Madsen join us for the evening session on Coaching Project Managers. We wanted to explore the idea that the PMO coaches project managers, after all we see it on a number of job specifications as a task that PMO should carry out. We had about 30 PMO Flashmobbers so at the beginning of the evening we needed to find out what the objectives were of the people in attendance. What would they like to get out of the session, what kind of answers were they looking for. These are just a few of them (and believe me, there were loads more!):
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
What is the difference between informal vs formal coaching?
What is a coaching style - is there a method?
What kind of experience and training do you need?
What is the PMO suppose to be coaching the PMs on?
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
A short article focused on "5 Things You Hate About Your Project Management Tools"
Unfortunately for me, the seminar didn't really deliver much in terms of PMO content - project management content yes, nitty-gritty PMO is evolving content, sadly no. Are my expectations too high? Or did I get it wrong? I still think we can have PMO seminars that don't slip into project delivery related talks (as good as they were, especially the talk from Stephen Carver on Complex Projects, there's a little video here)
