Rethinking the PMO: Lessons from Self-Managed Firms

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently about self-managed firms - firms where employees are empowered to make decisions and solve problems without traditional hierarchical management. Zappos is an example that might be familiar to you. The literature focuses heavily on organisations such as Buurtzorg. In these organisations, there is no hierarchy. So there is no one to approve decisions. Employees make their own decisions, following an advice or consent process. In fact, the firm I am setting up, kinesis.co.nz is a self-managed firm in the project management space. It’s such a fascinating area that is under-researched and misunderstood. It also comes with a few aspects that have been mentally challenging to me.

The theory goes that traditional firms put controls and processes in place that standardise the project delivery approach so that the breadth of delivery, which all aggregates into one person, can be easier and better understood, analysed, theorised and areas for improvement identified. If there were no standards, the sheer breadth of projects in an organisation would be almost impossible to comprehend, to understand which ones were going off-track and needed support. Self-managed theorists argue that the “error” in this approach is trying to aggregate it all into one person and letting teams self-organise, letting go of the need to control, to see everything, means we can let go of our standard delivery approaches and instead have “appropriate” delivery approaches for every project. In essence, we can let go of the PMO.

Of course, there’s the counter-argument that we need the process not to standardise, but to raise the standards of delivery. It’s a good argument, but the practice doesn’t support it. Everywhere there are self-managed firms, their success rate at delivery, their outcomes, their results, walk all over the results at hierarchical organisations. What that tells me is that we can raise standards without standardisation.

So have PMOs had their time? I’m not convinced that they have. Whilst I think there is a growing evidence base that there is “another way to do it”, there are still a lot of organisations built on the more traditional hierarchical models. Whilst there are still organisations built on those models, there will still be a need for PMOs. But it does raise the question of whether those of us responsible for managing and leading the PMOs in our organisations should be thinking about alternative ways of getting ever more engagement and value out of projects, and self-managed principles may be a part of that.

What if we built an advice process into our authority matrices? For a certain class of decisions, which would normally go to a Sponsor or Governance Group for a decision, what if we implemented an advice process instead and reviewed the results? An advice process is one where someone wanting to make a decision has to seek advice from others with knowledge, experience or who may be impacted by the decision. There is no need to heed their advice, but there is a need to seek it out and consider it. What would happen if we implemented an advice process for a certain class of decisions?

What if we dialed back some of the things we are measuring for some projects? Self-management theory advocates measuring the things that matter, which are always about the outcome, the purpose, not the detail. So what if the PMO applied that thinking to projects? What would happen to our projects if we stopped measuring deviation to schedule, or financial forecasts? It may be a leap too far for many, so choose something less consequential to stop measuring. The theory goes that the effort spent to (i) measure the thing and (ii) to influence the narrative about the measure so that your project is considered “a good corporate citizen” are significant. Stopping the measuring provides additional time and energy that can be focused onto delivery and in turn, generates better results. Is there an obligation to see if that is true?

I’m not sure how far traditional organisations will embrace self-managed principles, but I think as leaders of project delivery in our organisations, we have a responsibility to the organisation to start embracing some of these principles and observing if they have a positive effect on the results that we deliver.