The PMO – your catalyst for digital transformationMarcus SamphireHead of Discipline

PMO Services

September 2018

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About usSNC-Lavalin’s Atkins business is one of the world’s most respected design, engineering and project management consultancies. Together, SNC-Lavalin, a global fully integrated professional services and project management company, and Atkins help our clients plan, design and enable major capital projects, and provide expert consultancy that covers the full lifecycle of projects.

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The portfolio, programme or project management office (PMO) is uniquelypositioned at the heart of an organisation. It can be the catalyst for digitaltransformation by exploiting opportunities to make better and smarter use of data and technology.

Whether it exists to serve the enterprise, or is dedicated to a traditional portfolio, programme or project, the PMO function sees and touches most levels of the organisation – it sees upwards to business strategy and priorities and downwards to the realities of on-the-ground delivery. By re-imagining the PMO business model, processes, ways of working and culture, it can support creation of the environment for an organisation to exploit the opportunities presented by technology.

Introduction

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The days of the PMO providing purely administrative and transactional support services to an organisation are long gone.

Now, the PMO should influence organisational success more than ever before and provide the platform for greater organisational agility. It will achieve this by ruthlessly focussing on

what is most valuable; challenging and shaping strategy and portfolio; and supporting effective organisational change management. It will do this with fewer people who have more specialist skills and absolute clarity of mandate. They will be enabled by the effective use of technology to boost productivity and collaboration, especially across disparate teams, organisations and geographies.

Getting the PMO fit to exploit the opportunities presented by technology

Evolution of the PMO function

The PMO – your catalyst for digital transformation

Challenge, innovate and influence how an organisation delivers its work and what it delivers.

Support creation of a culture and environment for all delivery approaches, including more agile delivery.

Focus on providing the highest possible value to its customers.

Flex and scale to meet changing business needs in complex environments.

The PMO needs to

Provide transparency and visibility through insights and communication so effective decisions can be made.

The PMO will achieve this by:

Putting customers first.

Simplifying to focus on value.

Challenging and innovating.

Exploiting automation and artificial intelligence.

Providing insights from information.

Enabling self-service.

Nurturing the knowledge worker.

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The days of the PMO providing purely administrative and transactional support services to an organisation are long gone.

Now, the PMO should influence organisational success more than ever before and provide the platform for greater organisational agility. It will achieve this by ruthlessly focussing on what is most valuable; challenging and shaping strategy and portfolio; and supporting

effective organisational change management. It will do this with fewer people who have more specialist skills and absolute clarity of mandate. They will be enabled by the effective use of technology to boost productivity and collaboration, especially across disparate teams, organisations and geographies.

Getting the PMO fit to exploit the opportunities presented by technology.

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The PMO should influence organisational success more than ever before and provide the platform for greater organisational agility.

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Putting customers first

There is no point in offering excellent services if customers don’t want them. Relevance will always beat excellence.

There is no single PMO solution. The function exists in ever-more complex and volatile environments where change is the norm and priorities can be fickle. The PMO needs to be comfortable dealing with ambiguity but quickly work to reduce the uncertainty.

The priority should be to create demand for the service by providing an excellent customer experience. And that is not what the PMO thinks it should offer but what its customers say they want. To achieve this, the PMO needs to really get to know the people it serves:

By asking these questions, the PMO can develop a level of customer insight that should drive the design, implementation and operation of the function, including digital services. Any process, way of working or technology solution designed by the PMO without a deep level of understanding of customer objectives, behaviours and preferences will fail.

Developing user personae to represent customers and create ideal experiences and journeys are important design tools that can be regularly referenced when thinking about the potential success of a new process or way of working.

Simplifying to focus on value

Unnecessary complexity is the enemy of the PMO and any effective digital services.

The PMO will fail to deliver an excellent customer experience if it puts in place unnecessarily complex processes, ways of working or governance.

PMOs can be architects of their own downfall. It is in the DNA of a traditional PMO to establish tight governance, rigour and control, and mandate compliance and consistency. They are not to be ignored but the proportionality of each needs to be carefully considered to make sure it is not overly or unwittingly constraining the agility of an organisation or the ability of the PMO to provide the value and experience customers expect.

Disproportionate governance or control should not be considered as ‘valuable extra management rigour’. If the PMO is responsible for any process, activity and requirement that does not add tangible value to the organisation, it should be removed.

As well as having a negative impact on the customer experience, wasted activity will be consuming valuable PMO resource that could be focussed on providing the valuable services customers want.

The PMO – your catalyst for digital transformation

What are customers’ most critical delivery pain points that the PMO can help to alleviate (no more than three)?

What are the customers’ key characteristics? How do they behave, what roles or tasks do they perform, what are their frustrations, what is a typical day in their life?

How do customers want to interact with the PMO? What type of information do they want and how do they like to access it?

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Challenging and innovating

Continuous improvement never just happens. It requires commitment to create the right conditions for success.

For the PMO to survive and thrive, and fulfil its purpose of alleviating the organisation’s most critical delivery pain points, it will need to evolve over time. Inevitably, there will be a complex combination of environmental, portfolio and stakeholder changes and the PMO will need to transform and re-invent itself continuously.

Like the customers it serves, the PMO needs to expect change and create the right conditions for an innovation culture to flourish from within. Investment in innovation and change capability, combined with effective leadership, will help to create an environment where the PMO empowers the people working closest to its customers to proactively gather feedback and identify opportunities for improvement.

With the right level of capability embedded within the PMO, experiments and pilots for improvements can be designed and delivered effectively and in a timely fashion. By doing this in a controlled environment with specific targets for hypotheses to be tested, good quality customer feedback can be gathered to inform larger-scale roll-outs.

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Exploiting automation and artificial intelligence

The PMO should take advantage of automation and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the services it provides and, in turn, promote smarter delivery within the organisation.

Scarce PMO talent can be freed to focus on the highest-value customer-facing services by automating repetitive human activities using robotic process automation (RPA) or through the development of application programming interfaces (API).

Many of its processes and activities are ideal candidates for automation, making it not only a target in its own right, but a natural home from which to develop the skills and technologies required to implement automation more widely across the organisation.

Before considering automation, ask:

The PMO can use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the productivity and decision making of its people and customers. In its simplest form, narrow AI can be used to support the performance of tasks or to improve access to information through technologies such as ChatBots. More advanced machine and deep learning will suggest or perform activities on behalf of people based on learnings from past experiential data.

Providing insights from information

The PMO can access vast quantities of rich data that it should be turning into actionable insights to challenge and influence strategic and operational decision-making.

The PMO can lead the way in organisations by demonstrating its ability to make better use of available data and information and to exploit business intelligence technology, to enable better and faster decision-making.

An ideal candidate for automation is:

1. A process that is valuable to the customer, and

The PMO – your catalyst for digital transformation

Do we understand what our customers really value?

Have we simplified processes as much as possible and removed waste?

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2. Is repeatable and potentially prone to human error, and

3. Human execution of processes can be replaced by rules-based decisions that can be performed by robotic process automation (RPA) or application programming interfaces (API).

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Traditionally, the PMO has been tasked with gathering, assuring and reporting on historical project performance information to create a consistent view across the portfolio. This information may have provided confidence in what had been achieved to date but today the PMO is expected to provide a greater level of intelligent interpretation and analysis of information to influence future decision-making. In the current complex environment, where agility and responsiveness to change is the new norm, decisions need to be taken quickly and be backed by the strongest evidence base possible.

The PMO should adopt business intelligence approaches and technologies to provide historical, current and predictive views of portfolio or business performance. As well as having access to technology, the PMO should also employ people with experience of data analytics, visualisation and user experience design. These skills enable the PMO to tell compelling and accessible stories with relevant, accurate and timely data to influence decision-making. To be most effective, the PMO team should recognise the different ways that individual customers and stakeholders consume information and make their decisions, and tailor approaches accordingly.

To achieve this most proficiently, the PMO needs to be providing insights on the most important business questions. This will establish it at the heart of portfolio decision-making.

Enabling self-service

For the PMO to maintain its focus on providing value to existing and new customers, it needs to be able to coach and support people to be self-sufficient.

The PMO needs to develop and support sustainable knowledge management and self-service capabilities to exponentially increase the impact it can have on the organisation. If the scope of ask on the PMO is unpredictable, poorly defined or of little tangible value, the ability of the PMO to flex and scale as the organisational environment changes will be severely constrained.

The PMO should be actively pursuing a journey towards customer self-service where:

Today

We’ll do it for you.

The day after

We’ll provide you with accessto self-service tools and a knowledge base to enable you to do it yourself.

Tomorrow

We’ll provide coaching and support to help you learn how to do it yourself.

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To achieve this, the PMO should bring together its deep understanding of the customers it serves and the things they value the most, with its technology solutions, to provide access to self-configurable insights, guided learning, examples, templates and lessons learned – and do this in a way that reflects how customers want to consume the information.

The PMO team will possess the stakeholder engagement, coaching and advisory skills necessary to support their customers’ journey.

Nurturing the knowledge worker

The PMO is well placed to exploit technology-based innovation, but its most valuable asset remains its talent. To truly unlock the opportunities of digital transformation, the PMO needs to create a culture of autonomy and empowerment where decision-making is accelerated by pushing it to the people who are closest to customers.

If the PMO understands its customers and the things they value the most, and it understands the need to be agile and expects priorities to change quickly, then a traditional top-down leadership model is sure to fail or constrain its potential.

Organisational structures should be flattened, providing the PMO team with a clear line of sight to the mission or objectives its work is supporting. It should also provide straight forward routes to share customer feedback or make suggestions to continuously improve service delivery.

A lesser number of more highly skilled people gives individuals the opportunity to achieve mastery in their specialism and enables them to lead.

Thriving communities of excellence within, and outside of the PMO, can create the environment for effective knowledge sharing and the development of leading practice based on experience.

In this setting, the team is trusted, empowered and skilled to move the PMO closer to the heart of the organisation and further influence its digital transformation journey.

But can a PMO really be the catalyst for digital transformation? Every PMO is different. They all operate at a different level within the organisation and are given a different mandate – and this is the way it should be.

But the PMO may have some unique attributes that make it the perfect catalyst for digital transformation:

› It works closely with a wide range of customers, so it deeply understands what the business values the most, what drives individuals and how to support and influence them to embrace and adopt change.

› It operates as an impartial, ‘critical friend’ to the organisation, allowing it to provide subjective challenge and to identify new ways of working and business models.

› It has access to vast quantities of rich data and is a proficient user of technology, so it is well positioned to utilise both to enable better and faster decision-making and ensure information and knowledge is widely accessible.

› It provides support to different types of delivery vehicles and approaches, so is well positioned to harvest the knowledge, experience and lessons learned from the work it supports to enable smarter delivery in the future.

The PMO – your catalyst for digital transformation

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www.atkinsglobal.com

Marcus SamphireHead of Discipline PMO Services

Marcus Samphire leads the design, implementation and transformation of the PMO services we manage in partnership with our clients across the security, intelligence and government sectors.

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