Results Management Office? You’ve Got To Be Kidding

2 Comments / Project Management / By

Greetings Leaders!

There is a pretty interesting article at CIO Insight about Reinventing the PMO (read the article here). The general premise is that PMOs are good at delivering projects, but not so good at ensuring the project/product is actually what the business needs. Their recommendation – a Results Management Office (RMO). My response…. you’ve got to be kidding. This is insanity at best.

I just got through teaching a project management class over at CSUS. There are several areas I hit hard, and this is one of them. The course follows the basic PMI methodology… you know… Initiation, Planning, Execution & Control, and Closing. I add two bookends, Project Selection and Learning.

Project Selection

I always ask my students, is it the Project Manager’s (PM) responsibility to ensure the project makes sense? The response varies. My point…

If the project is not selected properly, the rest of what you do doesn’t matter.

The question is a fair one. Who is responsible for selecting the right projects at an organizational level? In my presentation The Curse of Project Management, I state that too much emphasis is focused on the project management team when it comes to project viability. Project selection should not be happening at the PM level and it if the organization is expecting the PM to ensure that the project fits the organization’s needs, it is in deep trouble. However, I do strongly believe that it is the PM’s responsibility to ask this question, and when in doubt, it should be elevated to an appropriate level.

Project selection starts with a clear vision and mission. This is set by the owner, President or CEO. If this is not clear… nothing else matters. If a clear vision exists, a viable project selection process needs to be established. I’m not talking about Portfolio Management. What needs to happen is the C-Suite, the Executive Team, needs to get its act together. Silos need to be broken down. Clear organizational objectives need to be established in a hard hitting, to the point, strategic plan. Too many times the Executive Team does a poor job of setting clear objectives for the rest of the organization, AND, leading them in accomplishing them.

I don’t think another bureaucratic layer called the RMO is going to solve the problem. It is only going to enter into conflict with the PMO, increase costs and muddy the water. The real problem with poor project selection lies with the leadership at the executive level. Let’s stop dancing around this problem and call it what it is.

Don’t establish an RMO…. when it comes to project selection and viability, invest some time in developing the Executive Team.

All the best!
All the time!
JT

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

2 thoughts on “Results Management Office? You’ve Got To Be Kidding”

  1. D

    An RMO is not an addition to a PMO – it is meant to replace a traditional PMO. Results Management focuses more on coaching teams through a project to get results whereas a PMO traditionally acts as just the scorekeeper, watching over the progress or lack thereof on a project. Your article seems to be more of an objection against poor priotization and organizational alignment than it is a coherent analysis of RMOs. I would suggest spending more time understanding both PMOs and RMOs, rewriting your article to present an objective analysis, and more clearly articulating your points around organizational aligment in a separate post. I have found RMOs to be particularly useful in a number of engagements and much stronger than traditional PMOs. In any event, good luck – you have interesting thoughts that could come together nicely with additional analysis and revision.

    Reply
  2. John Ikeda

    Thanks for stopping by!

    I appreciate your perspective and agree with it for the most part. My objection is in creating the RMO as a separate entity as an additional layer of bureaucracy. The functions of an RMO certainly need to happen… the question is where. If we replace the PMO with RMO, the risk will be that project are aligned but not executed. If we don’t add the RMO to the mix, the proven result is that projects may not be selected properly. What I am proposing or suggesting, is that the functions of both the RMO and the PMO need to be combined into a cohesive unit that does both. I haven’t read a case study on this, but I suspect the challenge would be to find the right blend of leadership to both strategically and tactically run an organzation’s projects.

    You seem very knowledgeable on a subject not many people have heard of. What do you do?

    Reply

Leave a Reply