12.3 People Issues Revisited

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During the initial stages of setting up the SPMO, you will likely spend most of your time communicating your vision of how projects will work to your team, to other business leaders, and to other members of the organization. First and foremost, make sure you have a solid grasp of what you want the SPMO to become. Always describe the SPMO in terms of the end state and not what you have in place at the moment. Make sure the people you choose to staff the SPMO understand your vision. Spend as much time as needed to ensure this, or you will be doomed from the start. Your SPMO staff should possess enough understanding of this undertaking to believe in it. It is not uncommon for the establishment of a working SPMO to take two or three months from start to go-live. Most of this time will be in transitioning staff, creating the BROC, training, communicating the new vision of how project work will be done, and training the development teams on how you want them to work on projects. It is not an easy undertaking by any means, but with the tools and templates provided in this book, you will be off to a good start.

I have found one key success factor in transferring the knowledge of an SPMO end state is to spend as much one-on-one time with your team as possible to reinforce the vision and keep the SPMO staff focused on the end state of what you want. As they see your commitment and gain confidence in their understanding of the vision you are espousing, they will begin to offer suggestions for improvement of the process. Listen to every suggestion made. Do not reject anything without bringing up the matter with your SPMO staff. Empower them to be the ones to decide if the suggestion is on track with the end-state vision or not. Remember, you can always overrule them when the decision is wrong or you disagree with it, but the point here is to empower your team to take control of the process. You should truly want them to own it. Anytime you overrule them, you take away from that empowerment and create an artificial dependency on your approval. My advice is to avoid that situation as much as possible. Empowerment gives people the chance to take responsibility for their actions. People tend to want to do a good job, and having the freedom to decide how that job gets done strengthens their bond with the organization. You will find out very soon that they dedicate themselves to creating a work product that usually goes far beyond your expectations. In more than 20 years of IT management, I have seldom been disappointed by taking this approach.

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