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PPM Insights: Enable Adoption when Implementing Organizational Readiness (part 2)

By Anon Anon posted Jan 19, 2018 10:34 AM

  

To follow up my previous post about of Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Organizational Readiness (OR), I will discuss some artifacts, processes and assessments that can enable an effective campaign. We already discussed the guiding principles, communication tools, plan and strategy. I will now discuss some further tools imperative to the success of an OR approach.

 

Below is a simple template, based on communication options. It is important to plan OR work and schedule delivery. The simple matrix's below are what I use to plan my day-to-day work.

 

 

The next section discusses the process. I acknowledge that we have been discussing OR, but a key component to communicating and training is understanding process and the ecosystem which the value is delivered. I most often see processes created in MS Visio or a stark format. Yes, some modeling tools are great when doing complex analysis, but PPM is just as much an art as it is a science and we would waste our time/investment if we tried to account for every possibility - we are people doing these processes, not computers. A simple first step (which I use with nearly every process definition and system integration project I work) is to whiteboard the contextualized process operating rhythm. Visually displaying "what" is entered, "when," and "why" it is important resonates and can be translated to visually friendly OR material as well as technical documentation.

 

Though the relative top-down view is vital, we also need details. Again, when has a plain process diagram truly impacted with a group of people? I prefer to use standard views (Like MS Smart Art) to dive into process detail – often in addition to MS Excel. This is the outline for the process details which can start as a whiteboard, iterated upon, then documented in a consumable form, to be used throughout OR activities. Further granularity could be added using MS Visio and spreadsheets . . . but I find a consumable aesthetic much more likely to be understood and adopted.

 

Lastly, as part of OR, we must identify and track our success. This can be done with some metrics and lessons learned activities. As we all have seen, formal OR and lessons learned activities are often the last to add and the first to go when managing PPM initiatives. We, PMOs and Product teams are all guilty of this. Just like the concepts of OR, these are not difficult tasks and may take as little as 30 minutes per quarter . . . but they add a ton of value. Some example metrics are below, but where PPM Practitioners fail is when they don’t have the (well organized) meetings/activities build into their cadence.

 

 

 

For more, check out the PPM Insights blog series. I encourage you to participate in the best-in-class CA Communities site, where we have access to peers, events and support. You can also reach out to CA Services for individualized business outcome references and analysis. Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog or contact me directly via email and @PPMWarrior.

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