Episode 155: Business Driven PMO Setup; Chapter 3 - Managing Projects: Think Process not Methodology
This week The PMO Podcast™ Featured Story introduces, “Business Driven PMO Setup; Chapter 3 - Managing Projects: Think Process not Methodology” presented by Mark Perry (about Mark), host of The PMO Podcast™. Each chapter of the book starts off with a cartoon and the cartoon in Chapter 3 goes like this. There is a picture of a guy standing next to members of the PMO. The guy asks, “You work in the PMO. Say, I’ve always wondered what you guys do?” One of the PMO folks replies, “well, as project manager I row the canoe ahead of the team and remove all of the logs, snakes, and debris in the water to make it easier for the team to navigate through the river.” Hearing this the guy retorts, “Ever think of taking an easier route?” Much like this cartoon that I just described, methodology can be, and often is, perceived differently by different people. For many people, methodology is a good thing. It presents a formalized way to manage projects and it demonstrates a level of project management capability and skill that is an order of magnitude better than the skill associated with managing projects informally and by ad hoc best efforts. For other people, however, methodology is not usually viewed as a good thing. It represents everything that is wrong with organization and bureaucracy and rather than being a help to project management, it is a hindrance. And, for yet a few other people, methodology is a four letter word. The key to having a useful and usable approach for managing projects is to think process, not methodology.
The PMO Podcast™ Points Memo presents, “PMI gives Agile a left-handed compliment." Recently, Don Kim, a certified PMP, posted a question on gantthead about PMBOK v4 going Agile. Don asks the gantthead community at large, what it thinks about this. And, Don got a number of replies to his post. They were all good and discussed and positioned the merits, similarities and differences of PMBOK and Agile in very sensible ways. But I had a different tact or I should say reaction.
The PMO Podcast™ Mailbag answers a listener question about whether or not a SaaS free-trials should be undertaken with little to no real due diligence or vendor selection.
The PMO Podcast™ is sponsored by BOT International, the provider of Processes On Demand, a PMO Setup solution used by more than 1,000 companies.
