Today’s market place has mandated companies to innovate and transform in their pursuit to remain relevant and competitive. While remaining strategically aligned to the company’s vision, they must dynamically launch a series of initiatives. This has resulted in a series of high-impact projects that must be executed and delivered at a rapid pace, while adopting to new and emerging technologies.
Traditional Program Management Offices (PMO) have been sporadically effective at managing business transformation programs. They were originally designed to support traditional business and operating models viz. to track, monitor and report, as opposed to managing benefits and results.
More often than not, they were neither empowered nor tasked to play an active role in supporting the program’s objectives. For companies to differentiate and grow in the digital economy, they are forced to innovate and change thereby mandating their traditional PMOs to transform and extend their role.
Arguably the top reasons for failed business transformations have been attributed to “human factors”. The general tendency has been to overlook their significance, inherent complexities and impact. This is not to undermine the classical activities of managing scope, schedule, cost, risks, technology and others.
During transformations, companies should proactively focus on managing human factors by leveraging the PMO. At the minimum, they need to address the following:
Building Mindshare: Communicating the company’s vision, goals and strategic objectives by elaborating how and why the transformation will be beneficial and in the process earning their mindshare.
Cultural Management: Managing culture has multiple dimensions and the impact varies from region to region. Our region probably has the most diversified workforce across the globe. This is an asset to any company, as long as the geo cultural complexities are proactively managed with the highest respect and sensitivities.
The second dimension is managing the company’s own culture before, during and after the business transformation. The third dimension is managing the culture of external partners engaged with the company in their transformation journey.
Communication: Communication should encompass both formal as well as informal modes. While communication must continue as per the governance structure outlined in the project charter, companies should encourage proactive informal communication, both within and across business functions and team members.
Companies must seek opportunities to reward deserving team members and regularly communicate these recognitions, to sustain high motivation levels.
Resource Management: Companies should do a reality check before embarking on a business transformation journey. In their enthusiasm to commence, they tend to lose out on prioritising the need for on boarding the right resources. They need to establish a Skill-Gap matrix to know what skills exists within the company, along with their availability, and what skills do not exist within the company to finalise their Talent On-boarding plans. Empowerment: Companies must empower their PMO to encompass schedule management, financial management, scope management, quality management, risk management, performance management, program operating standards, processes and reporting. They need to extend the PMO role to influence results and involve them in setting, measuring and sustaining the Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
The digital age has led to an unprecedented surge in business transformations, which has brought about its own challenges and complexities. To support transformations, companies should rethink, to include the following:
1. Define the strategic objectives of the Program
2. Ensure the Program’s objectives are fully aligned to the organisation’s strategic objectives, and the projects deliverables are in line with the program portfolio
3. Establish a Program Management Office (PMO) with core project management best practices, and highly skilled to manage organisation change management (OCM), business requirements, change requests (CR) and quality of deliverables, while adopting to agile methodologies for shorter delivery cycles
4. Proactively communicate with all stakeholder to gain their mindshare. They must establish genuine alignment between business needs and IT solutions, by maintaining sustained interactions across business units and other stake holders
5. Have a dedicated enterprise architecture (EA) team, to ensure enterprise wide integration across multiple transformational programs and projects
6. Form a core team of experts that includes the enterprise architecture team. This highly skilled team should address business concerns in addition to being technology experts. They should actively participate and support the project teams on delivery assurance, data migration, Testing/QA and functionality trade-offs while minimising the business impact
7. Identifying stakeholder and establishing their complete ownership to support the program during planning, execution and preparing them to adopt post execution
8. Sourcing the right skilled teams at the right place and right time
9. Aligning the team’s incentive and compensations to the success of the program and projects goals
10. Negotiating realistic contracts with competent vendors that will allow the PMO to support and help deliver the projects
The writer is an executive vice-president for a Dubai-based IT consultancy and services company. He can be contacted via Twitter @Stephen_Fdes
