Perhaps one of the hardest working PMO teams of the last 18 months, we kick off the PMO Conference 2021 with an inspirational story. How did the PMO manage to come together to build the wings whilst the plane was flying to support the delivery of the first vaccination in December 2020 and the subsequent millions of vaccinations since?
What were the priorities; what were the challenges and the triumphs? What was the technical response of the PMO and how did they support the people and cultural side of such a high profile deployment. How did they fair personally and emotionally – keeping pace with the ups and downs – and what do they think about their part in such a historical event.
We hear from two of the central PMO team from the COVID-19 Vaccination Deployment Programme.
I think we can all appreciate just how the aviation and travel industry was impacted in 2020 and still is today (at the time of writing in February 2021) Good news stories were hard to come by and we weren't expecting to hear one which specifically put the PMO at the centre.
We had the opportunity to hear that story from Virgin Atlantic's VP of Transformation and Head of ePMO.
Called the Art of the Possible, the PMO was all set with a kickoff event in January 2020 with the aim to support the organisation's ambitious plans, to do that they "needed real, rapid and reimagined organisational transformation, not only to the way we think about and plan but how we deliver change" This was the dream:
imagine being able to see all of your demand in one place
ranked by ease of implementation (RIICE) and
the value to your organisation (BVI)
that can be directly linked to bottom-line impacting KPIs
with benefits that are traceable
that everyone is aligned to what you are doing
and understands the context of why
Then the pandemic hit. Find out what happened and how they made it possible.
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.
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.
