PMO on Trayix

Remote governance without micromanagement

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Several months into remote work, many leaders miss something they never noticed they had: a feel for how projects were going. They used to see who was in early, who looked worried, and who was huddled around a whiteboard. Without that, some compensate by adding status meetings, demanding daily reports, or installing software that tracks activity. It’s an understandable reaction. It’s also the wrong one.

Why surveillance fails

Counting hours online or keystrokes measures presence, not progress. Good people notice quickly, and they respond by looking busy. Meanwhile the real signals, such as a blocked dependency or a risk growing quietly, stay hidden. More status meetings have a similar effect: they consume the time people need to do the work, and they rarely surface bad news any faster.

Value management: what the PMO should report

Wed, 24 May 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Most PMO dashboards report activity. Tasks completed, milestones hit, and a column of red, amber, and green dots. They answer “are we busy and on schedule?” but not “is this worth what we’re spending?” The second question is the one executives care about, and it’s the one the PMO is best placed to answer.

Why activity reporting falls short

Consider a project that finishes on time and on budget, then delivers a system nobody uses. Every status report was green. The project still failed to produce what the business wanted. Green means the plan is on track, not that the plan was a good idea or that its result mattered.

From status reports to strategy: the new PMO

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Ask an executive what the project management office (PMO) delivers, and you’ll often hear “a weekly status report.” Ask what they wish it delivered, and the answer changes: which investments matter most, whether we have the people to do them, and whether any of it is paying off. More and more, we hear PMOs being asked to answer those questions. A report that lists what happened last week doesn’t.

What changes

A traditional PMO tracks projects one at a time. A strategic PMO looks across all of them. That shift sounds small, but it changes almost everything the office does.

Rethinking the PMO for agile teams

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 09:00:00 +0000

When teams go agile, the project management office (PMO) is often the first group to feel the chill. Templates, weekly status reports, and compliance checks suddenly look like friction to people who want to ship. Some PMOs respond by tightening the rules. We think the better response is to change what the PMO is for.

Why the old model feels wrong

A traditional PMO works by standardizing. It asks every project for the same plan, the same report, and the same sign-offs, so leadership can compare them. That served a purpose when projects looked alike. An agile team shows progress through working software every few weeks, so a weekly document describing percent complete adds little. Teams see the report as extra work, and the PMO sees teams as undisciplined. Both are partly right.

Running agile teams inside a stage-gate process

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 09:00:00 +0000

Most large companies can’t drop their gate reviews overnight, and most shouldn’t try. Gates exist because executives need to decide where to put money, and that need doesn’t go away when a team starts using Scrum. The good news is that the two can coexist. The trick is translating what agile teams produce into what the gate committee needs to see.

Start with what a gate is for

A gate is a decision point: continue, change, or stop. Gate reviews often ask for documents because documents were once the only evidence available. Working software, a stable velocity, and a prioritized backlog are better evidence of progress. Your job is to present that evidence in terms the committee understands.