Getting the structure right in your Project Office
Building a sustainable project office means starting with the right structure.
In our previous insight, we looked at getting the foundations right when building your project office and established the importance of having a clear understanding of the vision for the project office and the projects you are looking to deliver. You are now in a great position to break this down further and look into the structure and the roles you will need in place to achieve this.
Firstly, it is important to start with the roles that you need, rather than the people that you have. Reviewing your existing talent is crucial but can cloud your judgement if you start to consider too early in the process where people might fit in before you have established your structure.
Leadership
It makes sense to start at the top and look at the leadership that you will need to put all this in place, who is going to shape and lead the Project Office and deliver the ongoing strategy? There will be some tough decisions to be made and it is vital that this role can gain the respect and support of senior stakeholders in the business as well as having the right leadership qualities to really get the best out of the team. This could be something you are skilled at, but it is important to be honest with yourself, and if leadership isn’t one of your strengths, then you need to look to find the right person.
Not to be confused with Sponsorship, Programme or Portfolio management, this is not about a role. It is about the skill to lead a team, having the chameleon like quality to keep one eye on the team’s growth and transition, whilst having the other eye firmly on the future vision. It also doesn’t necessarily need to be a project professional either, but it must be someone who is willing to listen and learn from their team members during this process. In short, strong leaders only need apply.
Management
Once you have the leadership in place, the next step is understanding who is going to manage your project office effectively on a daily basis? We have established whether you are creating a portfolio or a programme, the result of which will impact aspects of management. However, you will always need someone to set and defend the standards of Project Management across your organisation. This falls to a PMO Manager.
Your PMO Manager will be crucial in managing how the Project Office operates, a very different role to leading and driving the team forward. This role is suited to process-driven individuals who can work closely with your Programme and Project Managers to ensure that the governance and framework is effectively instilled into every project and programme.
It’s not just about having a detail-focussed approach though, a good PMO Manager understands project management, building confidence in PM’s and stakeholders and establishing themselves as more than just a documentation facility. They can build effective relationships with the team to keep them on track with the process but be adaptable to changes and unforeseen events in order to maintain focus on strategy.
Project Delivery
The project delivery team is there to do just that, deliver the technology and business changes necessary to realise the IT strategy. Your roadmap will most likely have a range of projects from large-scale, business-wide implementations to smaller, BAU projects and this is a consideration when planning your project delivery resources.
The main point here is that you need to ask yourself a question, what are they going to be producing and managing? If there is little governance in place, your business case is yet to be produced and you have a limited project support network, you’re going to need an experienced Project Manager. Setting up, starting and delivering all aspects of a project is no mean feat.
Again, if you are looking for someone to deliver true technology business change then a strong Project Manager is essential. This person should be able to manage upwards, engage stakeholders from sponsorship to benefits realisation. For them, technology is just a stage in the delivery of a business change.
However, if your portfolio is dominated by technology upgrades and maintenance activities, a Project Manager can be an expensive resource to use. It could be a good time to switch over to Technical Delivery Managers or Junior Project Managers whose role is to manage the delivery of the technology. A simplified role and one that is in the career path of engineers and service personnel aspiring to move into full blown Project Management.
In reality, the ideal is a combination of both, experienced project managers to deliver your larger and more complex projects and delivery managers or junior PM’s to maintain traction on the more day to day projects. Not only does this offer a cost effective solution but also creates a clear career path within the team for development and progression, something that is a rarity in many project offices.
Business Analysis
Similarly to project delivery, the type of business analyst you will require depends on what you need them to deliver, again leading back to your roadmap.
Your ‘Recorders’ are BA’s who gather information by interviewing business leaders and recording their requirements. The BA has the skill set to quickly come to grips with business process and work with stakeholders to identify and record requirements. Almost like an interpreter, they have the ability to turn business language into words that technologists can understand. Sometimes referred to as a generalist, they do form the backbone of your analytical capability.
Technical BA’s or Technical Consultants tend to have a deeper understanding of where technology can bring benefits to existing business processes. Their knowledge may be technology-specific or technology-agnostic but regardless, they are experienced in really drilling down and establishing how existing functionality can serve and improve business process.
Strategic BA’s work with the business to look for the opportunities in process and operations to increase revenue or reduce costs. This set of analysts are true to the term business analysis and have deep understanding of business operating model. They can sit either in the IT team offering a technology slant to the opportunities they identify or alternatively can sit elsewhere in the business, often in busines development or executive teams to provide the inputs into the next business and IT strategy.
Project Support
Often overlooked, but a fundamental part of a well-functioning team are the support roles. These are project administrators or coordinators to take ownership of a ream of administration tasks to free up the time of your project managers. This could be allocated to specific PM’s or more often a shared resource across the team. Either way, it is good to establish if these roles are part of your structure as this will directly impact the recruitment of your Project Managers and how hands-on they like to get.
These roles are often confused with the management role of the PMO but this is really a role designed to remove administrative burden from your more expensive management resources. A good example is for the cost of 3 project managers and a project support person, you could achieve the same output of 4 projects managers i.e. no loss of production and a 12% cost saving.
Quality Assurance
Why bring QA into your Project Office? Simple, the three corners of your delivery triangle are time, cost and of course, quality. When project timelines become pressured, it’s inevitable that quality is the element that slips. By housing Quality Assurance inside your Project Office, you are assisting your Programme and Project Managers in their management of quality risk, by bringing an independent view to both the identification of the risk and the mitigating action.
This may not alter the end quality of your deliverable, but it will increase the quality of the transition into Service having these specific risks being handled by a dedicated professional. They can also look at aggregate quality risk where confluence of initiatives increase overall risk to business performance/deliverables.
Business Change Management
The last piece in your Projects Office resource jigsaw, is the role of the Business Change Manager. Not just managing communications, but also training and immediate post go-live care, the role is key to making a business’s transition to a new solution as smooth as possible. The legacy of a successfully project is down to how well it is adopted by the business and a fundamental part of this is the investment in change management.
Remember, if your business isn’t prepared for the change, there will be disruption to business continuity. This role is also key to measuring your benefits realisation. If benefits are to be realised over the mid to long-term then this overseer and facilitator role continues throughout the period, ensuring measurement of the success of the business change.
It can be so easy to dive in and start recruiting for the roles that you think you need but by taking the time to really understand the structure that your project office needs to operate effectively, you will be able to build a team that successfully delivers your strategy.
Once you have clearly identified the roles that will sit within your project office, now is the time to look at the talent you have. Our next insight will look into how to identify the gaps and establish what resources you need to invest in.
If you would like to find out more about structuring your project office, we would love to hear from you