Back in April our Mini-Masterclass event was focused on facilitation skills - a skill every PMO professional should have. In this session we specifically focused on the planning side of facilitation.
The planning is an incredibly important part of facilitation, as that’s where the thinking has to go into exactly how we will achieve the outcomes of the task. How to break a task down into sub-tasks; decide what processes/techniques are to be used for each step; how to split the groups to make it effective, and take into account the nature of the task in terms of level of uncertainty, who will be involved and the time available.
Not enough time and thought is put into planning a session, so if we, as PMO professionals can be disciplined about doing this, it can make a huge difference in getting more successful outcomes from sessions, and better results for the project teams.
Ranjit Sidhu lead the session and introduced a high-level framework which she uses as part of the Facilitation Skills course which she regularly delivers.
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Does your PMO have any involvement with change management? At the March PMO Flashmob, held at Shell Centre on the Southbank, we wanted to find out more about Change Management and if there is a role for the PMO within that.
We had Ranjit Sidhu with us and Change Management is totally her bag (have a look at ChangeQuest to see what I mean) which was ideal for us because as far as I know there hasn't really been any conversations around the subject of Change Management and the PMO.
So just to be clear what we are talking about when we say Change Management, Ranjit gave us two definitions:
The application of processes and tools for leading the people side of change to achieve a desired outcome
and:
An approach to transitioning individuals, teams and organisations to a desired future state
So it's all about the soft, fluffy human side of projects and how people are affected when a project is being run and completed. So when thinking about Change Management, the ideal situation is to weave in these approaches, processes and tools as the project is being delivered. If we think about traditional projects, we tend to focus on the deliverables - when will they be delivered and by whom. Sometimes this focus on hard and fast deliverables means we often forget to think about what the impact of these deliverables might be on the people who will have to experience and work with them. If they're not happy it doesn't matter how well that project was managed, how quickly it was delivered and how much it cost, it won't be successful.
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