Stand Up For PMO

The PMO Soap Opera

We're now on to our ninth (ladies dancing) 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and some further insights from our first PMO Unconference. [You can see the other 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas here] In this post, we're celebrating the vibes of Coronation Street, Crossroads and Emmerdale and taking a look at a real-life PMO soap opera. With our first three themes of Setting Up, Running and Closing Down a PMO, the stand up soap opera ran across three episodes. Delegates took a lot of learning from this session presented by Chris Walters, take a look at the recordings:
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Coaching in All Directions

It's the eighth (maids a-milking) of our 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and in this one we picked up on the subject of coaching. This session was one of the Lightning talks from two of our Standuppers for PMO and also earned a post up on the ah-ha board with this insight "coaching can happen in all organisational directions". [You can see the other 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas here]
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Seven Ah-ha Moments

It's another of our 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and in this post we're sharing seven (swans a-swimming) things the delegates learnt plucked from the ah-ha board we had. The idea of an unconference is to share as much of the insights you can and for us that meant good old post-it notes after the Breakout at the Bar sessions and from thoughts after listening to some of the sessions. Here we share seven insights:
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The PMO Justice League

Here’s the fifth of our 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and some insights from our first PMO Unconference. [You can see the other 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas here] In this session, we shared a Lightning Talk. These were five minute slots which were given over the PMO practitioners who wanted to get up and share their own experiences and insights on a certain topic. There were nine brave souls getting up there and sharing on the day - each one of them did a great job and added some different and diverse thinking for the day.
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Standing Up for Lessons Learnt

It's another of our 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and some insights from our first PMO Unconference from Manchester. This is number four and we're learning lessons. In this session, Ken Burrell told us not to give up on the whole lessons learnt recorded challenges we face. We can do better, we must do better if the PMO is there to ensure the organisation performs better at programme and project management.
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PMO Room 101

It's another 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas - number 3! - this time we're looking at shutting down a PMO. It's not necessarily a bad thing of course - there are plenty of temporary PMOs out there that get closed down once the project or programme has been delivered. In this session from the PMO Unconference - Stand Up for PMO - we wanted to look at some of the negatives - some of the things that the PMO should be mindful of NOT doing. Take a look at the video session from Mike Belch and the Room 101 of PMO.
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PMO Stand Up \\ Setting Up a PMO

It's another of our 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and some insights from our first PMO Unconference from Manchester. With an Unconference the agenda of the day is set by the people who participate. When they arrived at the venue, they were asked to jot down their current challenges around the four areas - setting up a PMO; running a PMO; shutting PMO down and evolving and energising PMO. We then used some of these for the World Cafes. During the course of the day we had two World Cafe breakout sessions - conveniently in the bar area so we called it Breakout at the Bar. If you're not familiar with the World Cafe idea, essentially when we do them at PMO Flashmob events it consists of a table with a cover which can be scribbled on; chairs for people to sit down and a theme chosen for people to talk about. As you talk, you scribble stuff down. You don't know if these scribbles are useful, it's just a way of capturing points which you think are interesting or could be useful. The idea at the end of the discussion is to pick out what were deemed to be useful insights based on what the people around that table think are worth sharing with others. At the PMO Unconference we captured these on an ah-ha board  (as in, ah-ha that's interesting!) In this post we share some insights from the table themes around setting up a PMO
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Quite Interesting PMO Research

Here's the first of our 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and some insights from our first PMO Unconference. In this 15 minute session, we share the Quite Interesting PMO Research bit. All the sessions at the PMO Unconference were designed to be short and packed with information that hopefully signposts you to places to read more. In this session, I shared some of the latest insights from those in the research community who are focused on PMO. I wanted to cut through the research speak and explore what was useful for the PMO practitioner today.
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