The PMO is dead, long live the PMO?

I spoke at a forum the other day hosted by Virtrium. Virtrium has recently completed a white paper on the PMO and I was there to state the case against the PMO. I'm not in favour of PMO, the ones I've seen in action have dragged their programmes down, brought more cost in and given individual project managers a way out of being responsible for what they're delivering. I put the case against the PMO after someone who advocated the PMO and before someone who debated the middle ground. We sparked some lively debate amoungst the attendees. All well and good.

What was most interesting for me was a chat with one of the attendees afterwards. Her premise was that whilst I didn't agree with a PMO, my company had a few other things in place that essentially provided a very light version of the PMO. Namely, we have a business change board and I run a rigorous ITIL change process which means however mad the project environment gets nothing gets to go live and into production unless it's fit to go in (unless we end up with a JFDI from the Exec sadly).

Upon reflection and discussing it with her for a bit, I had to admit that there was truth in her argument. So, do I after all believe in the PMO? No, definitely not. If the processes that my company uses would normally be contained within the PMO that does not a PMO make, but I do appreciate her point.

For a fast changing business, a fully fledged PMO doesn't make sense - a change review board does. Having some massively formal team who, in my view, drive down productivity and make project management the most complex thing on the planet is far from needed.

Give a project manager sole responsibility to deliver, get the owner of the project to manage the PM and make sure the owner is responsible for the results of the project. That's what breeds successful projects. How the project manager and the owner go about delivering the project is neither here nor there, but the project will be focused on delivery and being fit for purpose and it encourages projects that won't deliver what's required to be killed off quickly.

As always, I remain open to having my mind changed, but so far, I've not seen anything that's going to change my mind on PMO functions right now.

What's the point in IT Strategy?

Should the CEO of a SME be as interested in a IT strategy as the CEO of a massive corporate? Does it help a business if there's a sound IT strategy in place? What exactly is the point of an IT strategy?

I believe every business can benefit from having an IT strategy, but only if that IT strategy is aligned to the business objectives. A CIO I worked for had the following strategy: "Make sure that IT supports whatever the revenue driving business units do." At the time, I thought that this sounded like a pretty awful excuse for a strategy, but over time I've come to appreciate what he meant and in the end agree with him. It provides a very decent generic IT strategy for any business big or small although I would now add something with the addition of "...and strive to do it for less without compromising quality." At the time, my CIO was in the fortunate position of having money thrown at his department - cost-saving piece was not on his radar - this was the man who would happily buy Alienware laptops as business tools.

Anyway, I digress. A strategy that says "Make sure that IT supports whatever the revenue driving business units do and strives to do it for less without compromising quality" is a strategy that should work in any company, big or small. The bigger organisations can afford someone, maybe whole departments, to drive this strategy, but for most smaller companies they won't have anyone who can devise and make this strategy a reality even though they desperately need it. Sure, many of them utilise third party companies to support and deliver their IT, but are they really going to be interested in helping their customer drive down IT costs when it will directly affect their bottom line? Probably not, and so the SMEs bumble along with their IT costing what it does, not really adding value to the bottom line, once more the necessary evil.

Now that technology is so central to doing business, an IT strategy is important to every company, big or small. The tough bit is getting the right person or persons to deliver it, particularly if you're an SME.