Conference Agenda
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
HBR Author, Speaker, Advisor, PMI Fellow, and Past Chair
Strategy Implementation Institute
Opening Keynote
PMOs Rest in Peace – Welcome Chief Project Officer
With the significant increase in automation of operations and the increase in change initiatives and project work, a new role is emerging in the executive committee. Companies are beginning to consolidate responsibility for orchestrating and successfully implementing the organization’s continuous transformation and significant strategic initiatives within a single C-level executive. And it’s not only multinationals and for-profit organizations.
The chief project officer goes far beyond the traditional Project Management Officer role or the direct sponsorship of individual projects. They must push their organization toward adopting a project-driven structure and foster a collaborative and empowering culture that reaches across silos. They must also collaborate with HR to develop project-management competencies throughout the organization.
The role should be fully integrated into the C-suite. Just as COOs have in the past, CPOs should behave like an extension of the CEO or even the board and, as such, hold the top managers accountable. CPOs may be rare in the C-Suite, but their steady emergence is a leading indicator of how companies will organize themselves to thrive in the project economy.
Catherine Lumb
Transformation PMO Senior Manager
Openreach
Building an Award Winning PMO supporting the Full Fibre Future of the UK
Openreach will build Fibre to 25million homes by 2026. The PMO was mobilised to support the execution of this strategy.
The transformation portfolio has over 200 projects across 6 programmes. The projects underpin a £0.5bn cost reduction whilst delivering new capability to improve service, customer & colleague experience.
The PMO vision and strategy were co-created with business stakeholders and the PMO has been on a transformation of its own ever since evolving its maturity & service offering.
Find out how Openreach became an award-winning PMO and meet the people behind this.
Henny Portman
Portman PM[O] Consultancy
From Plan-Based to Discovery-Based Portfolio Management
In order to manage the totality of portfolios, programmes and projects, portfolio management has been set up in many organisations. As agile working methods are increasingly used in practice, governance via programmes, projects, budgets and resources is shifting to governance via roadmaps, backlogs, sprints and teams. This calls for agile portfolio management.
Agile portfolio management is considered in its full breadth in this session, from fully planned to completely discovery. Henny Portman covers ten focus areas to increase the agility of portfolio management as also described in the book Agile Portfolio Management – The Bridge to Strategic Agility (Henny Portman & Rini van Solingen). Moving step by step towards more discovery-based portfolio management helps to make strategic choices in the portfolio better, earlier, and more flexibly. For each measure Henny links it to the most important control variable (E.g. cycle-time, work-in-progress, result orientation, validation focus, decision-making structure, …) on a scale from plan-based portfolio management to discovery-based portfolio management and discusses related techniques and examples.
John Greenwood
AECOM
The Risk Register – the Core of Successful Delivery
The risk register is frequently a risk of worries, useless as a tool for actually managing the risks. In this session, we get back to basics and focus on the role of the PMO in risk management.
The role of the PMO is to provide services and support to ensure consistent risk management practices are designed, implemented and maintained. The PMO has a wide remit to provide support in areas such as identification, assessment, planning, monitoring and controlling – yet the risk log and register are often the only reactive service provided.
In this session, the focus is on the proactive role the PMO can take – including understanding where to look for the risks, how to capture them, and how to plan and manage responses.
Paul Fenton
Director
PMO Data and Psychology Ltd
Turnaround PMOs
In this session you will find out what Turnaround means in the Public sector, how it is linked to Special Measures and why a PMO is a critical part of getting ‘out of Turnaround’.
Whilst the term Turnaround is not limited to the Public sector, you will find out what are the triggers for a Public Sector organisation to be ‘put into Special Measures’, how Turnaround is involved, common themes and practical experience from 4 organisations who have gone through the ‘Turnaround journey’.
Learn from someone who after leaving the Private sector has worked across the UK in the NHS, Local government, Not for Profit and the Police; setting up, refreshing and maturing PMOs.
Ian Finch
Head of Portfolio Management Office
Virginmedia O2
The Virginmedia and O2 Portfolio Management Office
How does a PMO create a new standard for delivery within a Framework ensuring the ‘best of both’ is retained when two Telecommunications giants merge
When O2 and Virginmedia merged in June 2021 they needed to create a standard single way of governing and delivering in excess of 1000 projects every year!
This is the story of how their two PMOs became a unified Portfolio Management Office and the journey they undertook from the first introductory meetings to the launch of the Framework and the continued transformation that they are delivering today.
You will hear about:
• How creating a common purpose creates the foundations for successful transformation by enabling fast decision making that underpins rapid development and change
• How company cultures and maturity levels play a key role in the design and roll out of processes and tools.
• The challenges of rolling out change amidst companywide change
• The safeguards and techniques deployed to ensure a successful launch and continued transformation
• The first year of their transformation – the Lessons Learned
Peter Macey
Founder, PMO-Cloud.com, Planning and Reporting Consultant and Director of Kipeco Consultancy Ltd
Data, What is it Good for?
Data is fundamental to any organisation and adding value to the organisation should be top of the PMO goals. In this session the focus for PMO practitioners is on understanding the data you have in your control, the impacts of it and how to use it in a meaningful way.
This session discusses:
• What is accurate and good quality data.
• Why linking good data adds value and insight
• Having a central data view that can be sliced in many ways, helps inform the organisation.
• Why having disparate sources of data is not ideal and why there should be one source of the truth.
• How data should be freely available to process in whatever way required.
• Why your process should define how you work, not your tooling solutions.
The session invites you to think more broadly about the data aspects of the PMO role and how that impacts the role of the PMO and the service it provides.
More Sessions Being Added
We continue to add great speakers with brilliant PMO stories and insights throughout the Early Bird period.
Get your ticket at a great rate and join us in London this June.