The PMO can't make projects succeed, but it can certainly have a hand in project successes by building the right foundation for projects and the right infra​structure of support and tools for the project managers within it. How? How do we get the PMO into supercharge mode and make our project outcomes more successful for our project customers? Here are my thoughts on 4 key ways we can start supercharging our PMOs right now...

Get the best PPM possible. PPM seems to be the tool of the hour, day and year. Project Portfolio Management – or PPM - is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. Do we really need a PPM tool to do the PMO right? Yes. And not just a PPM tool, you need the right PPM tool for your organization, your types of projects, and your overall PM infrastructure needs. You may even want to really supercharge your whole organization with a hybrid PPM tool. One that allows you to combine the best of Scaled Agile with all major features of common PM standards including PMI, IPMA and PRINCE2. With a hybrid PPM you can work smarter by taking advantage of fully integrated agile methodologies such as Kanban boards complementing proven, traditional tools like WBS and Gantt charts.

Hire experience over certification. I may not be popular on this topic so let me have it. But seriously, in many cases the most experienced available project managers will likely be certified as well. I'm just saying I would not weed out any applicants over lack of certification. Rather, I will often weed out applicants over less than 'x' amount of experience - possibly 5-10 years experience minimum depending on the current project landscape for the organization.

Present the PMO's accomplishments to senior management. If project management office has had a successful and profitable run so far - and that's the only way you would want to present this (failure would just be... well... sad) - then formally present such info and metrics so as to sufficiently impress the higher-ups. Doing this positions the PMO strategically for funding, new resources and big dollar challenges as your c-levels see capabilities in the organization they might not otherwise realize they have.

Get leadership involved in the projects. This one is key. If you are executive management, get involved with the PMO. Look at the portfolio of projects. Help with funding. Show support of the director and the project managers. If you’re the PMO director or a project manager in the organization, invite a member of senior management to several customer project status meetings as a show of interest in the customers and the projects you’re leading for them. Get them to attend several project kickoff meetings if they don’t already do that. If your CEO is in attendance at a formal project kickoff meeting, I guarantee that you’re customer will feel important from Day One. And that’s a very good thing.

Summary / call for input

The functionality and performance of the PMO isn't often a direct factor in the success of many projects. Indeed, it is more of an enabler of success – helping to create a roadmap to success for projects overall and greater profitability, customer retention, and project manager development for the organization and the PM infrastructure. By planning, innovating and structuring our PMO to better serve our project managers and by positioning it and the organization to better understand what projects to take on with a solid PPM tool, we can help strengthen the revenue flow for the organization through a growing portfolio of projects. If you build it, they (customers) will come.

Readers – how do you feel about this list? What are your experiences in the good and the bad of PMOs? What would you change or add here? Please share and discuss.

What exactly is hybrid PPM? First let's consider what PPM is and should do and then let's explore what happens with a hybrid PPM tool.

Project Portfolio Management – or PPM - is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics.

What a PPM should be

The right PPM will help you analyze and choose the right projects. What technologies is your company equipped to handle this next quarter? What are your revenue goals and do the current projects in the pipeline matchup with those two and other criteria you've setup to help determine what projects to start next or even chase next? Your PPM should be able to help you with those decisions.

Knowing your resource requirements and allocations is a key to proper project staffing. The right PPM knows how extended your resource pool is and what skill sets are available. If that next project isn't a match for the organization then the PPM will flag it as a concern and show you why it's not a match. If you can't take it on with the resource availability you have right now, then you won't and that means saving you from an embarrassing customer situation. I've been there – I've helped organizations figure out which projects they can take on and which ones they should set aside for now even though the CEO has made promises. It's hard – but the PPM makes it easier.

The PPM will help you fund what is needed now. Allocating financial resources to the proper projects is often a painful selection process for the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Operating Officer (COO), General Manager, PMO Director or whoever makes those decisions in your organization. Not everything can be started when you want to and jumping the gun on projects you aren't ready to fund can cause failures from the outset. The PPM will help you put the right projects on the overall project landscape today for greater success for the company.

The hybrid PPM approach

A new hybrid approach to project management allows you to combine the best of Scaled Agile with all major features of common PM standards including PMI, IPMA and PRINCE2. With a hybrid PPM you can work smarter by taking advantage of fully integrated agile methodologies such as Kanban boards complementing proven, traditional tools like WBS and Gantt charts.

One tool does this better than any of the others on the PPM landscape... ONEPOINT Projects is a modern, flexible, standards-based PPM web application that is available both on cloud and on premise and is trusted by hundreds of customers across industries. By covering the whole project life cycle and integrating with leading enterprise applications such as Jira, Confluence, Slack and SAP, ONEPOINT enables a new way of integrated project work.

Every once in awhile we find that product or process or program that can help us out immensely in the project management and project portfolio management world. I think I've just found it in a latest connection with some great individuals standing behind a stellar product. The product is ONEPOINT Projects.

ONEPOINT Projects is a modern, flexible, standards-based PPM web application that is available both on cloud and on premise and is trusted by hundreds of customers across industries. By covering the whole project life cycle and integrating with leading enterprise applications such as Jira, Confluence, Slack and SAP, ONEPOINT enables a new way of integrated project work.

Here are some key features and focuses that really set them apart from other PM and PPM tools offered today...

• ONEPOINT has very good interactive work breakdown structure (WBS) with drag & drop that is automatically kept in sync with other planning tools such as activity list and schedule (GANTT). Users of ONEPOINT have found this to be a great advantage and it helps make ONEPOINT standout in the filed of PM related tools.
  
  
• ONEPOINT has probably the best two-way synchronization with the very popular Jira offering.
  
  
• The individuals behind ONEPOINT's design have done a great job of balancing good usability with standards conformance. This is a very important consideration as the user base masses are highly concerned with user interface and usability as part of the overall strategic adoption and execution in the enterprise software world.
  
  
• ONEPOINT is a hybrid PPM tool – offering the best of agile and traditional PM in one solution. Plus, according to their product roadmap that I've discussed with them, they will be strengthening this even more in their upcoming 2nd gen agile planning and controlling component in their next major release 19 due later in 2019.

There you have it... several reasons you should check this tool out as I have. Make your job easier, make project management and PPM more interactive and complete, and help bridge any agile and waterfall gaps you may have in the organization – with one tool. Oh – and collaboration? The best. Go to ONEPOINT Projects and read about this product and all of these features and more and be sure to get access to your free 30-day trial and give it a test run.

Would you like to be an independent consultant? Do you have a marketable expertise? Do you have the other skills necessary for running a successful business?  Consider these questions before launching your consultancy.

​Independent consulting is not for everyone. If you're a company man – or woman – and you've been with the same organization for 20 years and the thought of change scares the hell out of you, then it's not for you. Change may be the best thing in the world for you, but success probably won't come easily – or even ever. You'll likely be too stymied by what just happened to you (getting laid off) or what you just did (quit outright) to think on your feet and react quickly. Don't do it – unless layoffs are imminent. If that's the case, or if you think it may be an option for you, then start thinking about your next move now and consider whether or not independent consulting is for you.

What is your favorite Project Management tool? What helps you manage projects, resources, tasks, financials and possibly the whole portfolio? And why is it so good? Tell me. Comment here on this blog post, email me at begeland@gmail.com, or contact me through my site at Brad Egeland.com/contact. Thanks!

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How many of you have an Amazon Alexa device? Or a Google Home? I'm sure most of you have used Siri before.

We’ve got a few of these devices in our house and it seems that every few days we find a new way to use them. They play music for us, answer math, vocabulary, geography and history questions for my homeschooled kids and tell us weather conditions in some of the areas we are possibly considering visiting or moving to in other areas of the US. Or they simply tell us tomorrow’s weather. It seems they can do anything.

Devices and tech like Alexa and Google Home are nice examples of how machine learning and voice based artificial intelligence are helping us now and learning immediately from their own mistakes and getting better over time to help us more - and more accurately - in the future. Today, just for fun, I said “Alexa, manage my project.” As you may have suspected, she replied with “Sorry – I'm not sure about that” because she can't do that... yet. But what if she could?

I know my good friends over at ONEPOINT are experimenting with how to tie AI into their hybrid project management solution - get on board now with a free trial and see how ONEPOINT fits for your project management and PPM needs.

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating many areas of our lives – in good ways – that we probably don't even realize. It won't be long till the tools that we use to manage projects will likely incorporate – to some degree initially and to a greater degree over time – some elements of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Future machine learning capabilities of these software tools will bring new meaning to lessons learned!

Think of the uses...

Status reporting. Artificial intelligence and machine learning could be of huge benefit in this necessary, regular and sometimes time consuming and difficult project management responsibility. In the same tool as – or a tool connected with – the project schedule, the resource plan, the financial accounting database for the company that has the codes for every active project and other things I'm not thinking of right now, an AI assisted solution could be instrumental in bringing forth the best and most accurate project status reporting structure ever and be able to change and scale with the individual project and the portfolio of projects as needed by the organization and even the individual project customers.

Requirements gathering. Surveys have shown that IT organizations pay huge dollars for poor requirements gathering. By integrating AI techniques in the requirements phase can the right AI capable tool can have a great impact on this problem and help realize more complete and well documented requirements. Artificial Intelligence is the intelligence of machine, which provides creativity, solving problems, pattern recognition, classification, learning, induction, deduction, building analogies. and knowledge. It is concerned with the study and creation of computer systems that display some form of intelligence and efforts to apply such knowledge and techniques to the design of methods and computer based capabilities to help us effectively manage the business process in the as-is state and the to-be state and properly extract and document all necessary requirements to get us there to that to-be state post implementation.

Budget analysis and forecasting. One of the hardest things about managing the project is keeping it on track financially. A 10% budget overrun is generally not seen as a failure and can be relatively easy to recover from if you stay on top of the financials on a weekly basis. A 50% overrun is a failure and not something you will likely be able to fix by the end of the project - it's just too big. Think about the possibilities for an AI assisted PM tool that was tied in to the organization's accounting system. Of course, cybersecurity and risk management would be a necessary evil of this, but would you like this sort of assistance with keeping your projects on track financially. An enterprise PPM solution with AI capability could be a project manager's and CFO's best friend.

Resource management and forecasting. Just like a tie in to accounting or any financial data for the project can automate, report and analyze the financial piece of the project... AI can do the same for resource usage – especially as it appears over or underutilization is happening or going to happen in the near future on the project. Think of the payback that can happen by knowing four weeks down the road you will have a resource that is 50% under utilized and is not being used by other projects at that time. It can mean that he can be assigned to other projects more easily and quickly or that you can utilize him differently during that timeframe on the current project. The organization is always striving for 100% utilization and sometimes it's difficult to see beyond each individual project – AI can make that happen more easily across all projects.

Lessons learned. If there is one place that AI could help the most and the fastest it could likely be in the Lessons Learned category. Just like machine learning is an ongoing process, so is Lessons Learned. With connections into all key elements of project management tools in use as well as the systems that feed information into them that have been automated, AI should be able to extract the best and the worst of the project to at least at first prepare for the lessons learned sessions. As learning causes growth and additional built-in functionality, an AI assisted tool should be able to document on it's own many of the issues on the project that evolved over the course of the engagement – probably some that neither party was even aware of.

Risk management and cybersecurity. The domain of risk management lends itself particularly well to cognitive computing capabilities, as typical risk issues often include unlikely and/or ambiguous events. Companies and public sector organizations have progressed in terms of using massive amounts of internal and external data to take a more preventative risk stance. Traditional methods of analysis have become increasingly incapable of handling this data volume. Instead, cognitive capabilities - including data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing - are supplanting traditional analytics and being applied against these massive data sets to help find indicators of known and unknown risks. Just as smartphones, online shopping sites, and music apps learn and adapt based on our preferences, cognitive computing can be used to teach computers to recognize and identify risk.

The use of artificial intelligence to manage risk is particularly helpful when handling and evaluating unstructured data - the kind of information that doesn’t fit neatly into structured rows and columns. The possibilities seem endless for AI assisted solutions in the project management / risk management realm. Too many projects allow too little risk management planning – an AI assisted solution could do a far better and more thorough job in much less time saving tens of thousands of dollars in the process on large tech projects.

Summary / call for input

The bottom line is this … we can get better at how we manage projects. Too many failures – yes... some things are out of our control. But I do believe withs many evolving and expanding tools we have at our disposal combined with logical best practices, we can make some of these project failures a thing of the past. Will AI manage our projects in the future? No. But they likely can and will greatly assist us through features incorporated into the project tools available for us to utilize during project engagements. I think it's going to be fascinating to watch the evolution of these features.

Readers – what's your take on artificial intelligence? Do you think it will be part of the project management landscape in the not to distant future? What about this list – what would you change about it or add to it? What's your vision for AI assisted features in project management over the next 5-10 years? Please share your thoughts and discuss – a few visionaries can contribute generously to the PM landscape by sharing thoughts and ideas on this topic.