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The Incubator or the Project Management Office - PMO
May 20, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings, Project Management Office
The Incubator or the Project Management Office - PMO
By Demian Entrekin
The concept of a business incubator has been with us for some time. The term may be relatively new, but the concept is certainly is less new.
Speaking very generically, incubators are places where entrepreneurial folks can come together to develop new ideas and solve problems. In my mind, the big idea that separates an incubator from other organizational groups is the people that work there. People who end up in incubator environments tend to excel at creating new things where nothing was there before. They also excel at focusing on thorny problems and coming up with applicable solutions.
For the sake of comparison, Think Tanks are quite another entity altogether. Think Tanks seem to focus more on ruminating and explaining. They write papers. They issue opinions. They consult with leaders. But they do not solve problems. A Think Tank is somewhere that highly educated folks go to keep their hands clean.
In an incubator, people solve problems, and in some cases create new, more important problems.
But what about the PMO? The typical Project Management Office constitutes a group of people who focus on getting projects defined, prioritized and executed. They own standards and progress reporting. Mostly, they are often expert tacticians, closer to plumbers than to architects. I recently spoke with a CIO who thought of the PMO as an incubator. He didn’t use that term, but he certainly had that notion in mind. “My PMO is full of innovators.”
The people in his PMO were incubator people, idea generators, problem solvers, change agents. In other words, this CIO had concluded that the PMO was the engine of change, and not the police force of Project Management standards. Sure, these folks need to understand how to run a project. That is a given.
But when you put your best, most creative people in the PMO, what happens? For one thing, that PMO now becomes the locus of creative change. And if you have realized that change gets delivered in organizations via projects, then you have made your change engine into a creative change engine.
The big idea here comes down to this: when you treat your PMO more like an incubator, a place where problems are relentlessly pursued and solved using new ideas, then you have fundamentally changed the engine of change. I highly recommend we all start to think this way.
Demian is the CTO of Innotas. As founder and CEO, Entrekin oversaw marketing, product development, sales and services for the company. Today, he focuses on strategic product direction. Prior to Innotas, Entrekin co-founded Convoy Corporation and was Chief Architect of its initial products. In that role, Entrekin helped the company lead the middleware market with an annual growth rate of 670 percent and played an instrumental role in Convoy’s subsequent acquisition by New Era Networks in 1999. A recognized thought leader in Project Portfolio Management, Entrekin has published numerous papers on PPM and his blog (PPM Today) explores current issues related to successful PPM implementation. During his 18 year career, Demian has assumed leadership roles as a consultant and as an entrepreneur, delivering commercial and corporate database applications. Demian holds a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University.
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