« Project Management Office Improvement and Lessons Learned
Do Project Managers Need to Know Content? »

Improve Your PMO Effectiveness by Walking Around

March 19, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Project Management Office

Improve Your PMO Effectiveness by Walking Around
By Zenkara

As a PMO member, probably one of the most productive things you could do for your customers is to get out from your desk and get into businessland.

By physically staying in the PMO team area (and let’s face it many do), you risk becoming isolated – organizationally, culturally as well as physically. Your value and relevance to the organization dwindles and you begin to be asked to justify your existence. The day you get asked this is the day you should start polishing your CV and call employment agents.

Getting out and about has a number of effects:

  1. It forces you to think who your customers are. Sometimes this is obvious, but often there are indirect customers and stakeholders you may have not considered.
  2. Your visibility in the organization grows, and if you’re truly adding value in the company, you build your reputation.
  3. You get firsthand experience of what is being done and what problems are occurring. Email is a strong filter – stronger than we realize. We need to know things that people are often reluctant to write in an email.
  4. You can provide immediate support and relay the types of training and support needed back to the other members of your PMO team.

The AFD indicator is a useful tool to see if you’re doing a good job as PMO (in addition to your projects performing well)

  1. Count the number of hours you spend in userland.
  2. Count the number of hours spent behind your desk

Divide A by B

If the result is greater than or equal to one, you’re doing a good job.

If the result is less than one, get out from your desk!

Zenkara focuses on streamlining and deploying business processes and quality systems and accelerating decision making through OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and metrics systems. Zenkara is located in Brisbane, Australia.

Share this article:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • blogmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Yahoo! Buzz

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 and is filed under Project Management Best Practices, Project Management Office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 people have left comments

You must be in touch with what is going on and the best way is to walk around. Every morning, every afternoon & every evening! Offer yourself & be available. You can say your available but until you are right there no one knows for sure.

Thanks for share another post!

Kimba Green wrote on March 19, 2010 - 7:55 am | Visit Link

Yep, it certainly makes sense to get out and about.
But looking at numerous PMOs - maybe not so well followed in practice.

Zenkara wrote on March 20, 2010 - 6:01 am | Visit Link

Can you tell us more about AFD indicator? What means?

Michael wrote on May 13, 2010 - 4:35 am | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Project Management Categories