Facilitating Action Through a PMO
My post “Consulting Customers! Get Your Act Together” elicited some good response from Sensei at ActiveEngine and Miki at Leadership Turn. I lamented about companies who are unable to pull the trigger on the next phase of a valuable project. Miki appropriately focused on the business culture required to enable standardized executive decision making processes; Sensei gave a great example of an organizational structure that enabled decision making:
“In this particular case there was a PMO which acted as a mentor to a sales department charged with re-vamping their prospecting and acquisition processes and systems. The PMO, with the department head, reported to a subset of the executive committee. In fact, the PMO chose the consultants to augment the analysis portion of the project. It was one of the best executions I’ve seen in years as resources were aligned and the teams had to answer directly to the CFO.”
I asked him to share more about the roles and changes involved:
“As would luck have it, the VP of the PMO went on to be promoted to CAO so there it was a natural extension of the senior management team. Interestingly enough, one the consultants for the project assumed the role that the CAO left open after his promotion, so most of the synergy that stemmed from the analysis and project management style remained on staff.”
This sounds like a well functioning organization that uses a PMO to facilitate action on projects. The culture also seems to allow the PMO to function as an arbiter and key supportive element in executive decision making.
Do you use a PMO to enable or assist executive decision making on projects and use of outside consultants? If not, how do your executives engage on decisions of this sort? We’ve all experienced organizations that grind to a halt when executives seem frozen on next steps, what role does culture play in making high level decisions happen quickly? MORE EXAMPLES and YOUR EXPERIENCES please!
Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via EMAIL or RSS.
