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Marketing Your PMO - Positioning Project Management
August 18, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Office
Marketing Your PMO - Positioning Project Management (#6 in the series Marketing Your PMO)
By Derry Simmel, PMP, MBA, FLMI
I want to talk a little about the shameless promotion of the PMO and Project Management. Personally, I am not very good at this, but this is an essential part of your job as director. You are trying to institute a change in your company and the name of that change is Project Management. Even if you have a fairly fertile environment and a high maturity level, you still have to get out there and talk it up.
How many of you just said “yech?” Believe me I understand; Project Management is a good thing, that’s obvious right. All we should have to do is demonstrate success and everyone will see and want to implement Project Management immediately. As we internet geeks say – ROFL. For the most part, people will attribute your success to you, luck or some other factor. This is not to say that they do not appreciate it or harbor any ill-will to you.
We have been taught from the beginning that success is achieved through hard work, skill, perseverance and sometimes luck. When is the last time someone thanked a process for their success? OK, except for those infomercials that show you how to make millions in real-estate or surfing the internet. In our minds, success is a personal thing; even group successes are achieved through the personal contributions of the team members. We’ve grown up with great personal examples of success - heroes. Admittedly, it’s not a bad thing for you to be associated with success, what you want to do is leverage the success to show people how Project Management can help them achieve success as well.
What You’re Up Against
Here is an example of the mental barriers you will face. Take a look at how computers are used. Today it is generally recognized that most workers can and do benefit from the use of computers. In particular, office workers get more work done with higher accuracy and in less time. (Of course we are now expected to do twice as much work in half the time). When mainframe computers and later personal computers came on the scene, they were widely resisted. There were still plenty of people doing their spreadsheets with calculators and typing memos on typewriters. Computers did not achieve success, they enable success. They were a lever that enabled people to do more, better, faster. Project Management is the same thing.
Position Project Management as an Enabler
When you talk about the successful completion of projects, spread the credit wide and excessively to every person involved. With this praise throw in phrases like “our PM processes enabled the team to identify and resolve issues before they became critical.” or “PM helped team members focus their efforts on the critical features that we delivered on-time on-budget.” And so on. If you can get any quotes from people – get them and publish them. Don’t force anything, you do not want false testimonials, you want something that the team members will repeat in 6 months without you around. The message here is that success does come from hard work AND Project Management gives you an advantage.
Position Project Management as a Tool
This is kind of an enabler too, but you will want to use the work tool, or toolkit. This model may work better for some people than the less tangible enabler model. In this case, you would rephrase the quotes above to something like: “Team members used the Critical Items log to ensure that they delivered the greatest value.” Not a great one, but you get the idea. An analogy here that I’ve use a lot is that you can hammer in a nail with a rock, a hammer, or a nail gun. We are tool users who are always seeking better tools, when you position PM as a tool, your message will resonate well.
Position Project Management as a Time-Saver
Personally, I like to position PM as a time-saver. My thought is that when you do a project, you will do the PM process one way or another. You will have to know what your issues are, you will have to know due dates, costs, resources, etc. You can either spend your time creating a method with each project, or you can use one that is proven to work, and change it as needed to meet your needs. So the quotes here are “the team saved significant time by prioritizing tasks using the Critical Items Log.”
Ultimately, you want to look for every opportunity to promote PM, but to promote different aspects and capabilities. You know your culture and the people you work with, some approaches will resonate, others will not. Part of your job will be to find this out and change your message to be meaningful. Don’t think that this ever ends, you will want to keep trying new avenues of communication and messages as things will constantly change and you will need to adapt – but you knew that!
Mr. Derry Simmel, PMP, MBA, FLMI
Derry Simmel has been in IT and project management for over 15 years. He has started 3 PMOs in the last 6 years, the latest of which is with a large project for the State of South Carolina. Derry has an MBA from University of Phoenix and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of South Carolina. He currently serves as the Vice-Chairman of Membership for PMI’s Project Management Office Special Interest Group and as the VP of Programs for the PMI Midlands Chapter. Derry maintains All about Project Management Offices, a professional blog covering all aspects of PMO.
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