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Highlights from Gartner’s PPM and IT Governance Summit — Part 2: Effective Communication

Published By Jerry Manas
Highlights from Gartner’s PPM and IT Governance Summit — Part 2: Effective Communication

In my last post, I commented on Gartner’s points about the evolving role of the EPMO. Now, I’ll talk about another of their key points — that communication is key to PMO success, and that when communicating to executives, “it’s more important to be interesting than complete.”

As anyone in marketing knows, truer words were never spoken. Gartner illustrated the following common pitfalls when communicating (I’m paraphrasing their points below):

  • Lack of Candidness (All good news):
    For example, communicating the “all green dashboard” where everything looks rosy. To an executive, this raises warning flags. It also sends a message that the culture doesn’t allow for candidness in its reporting. It may even send a message that the project sponsor or manager isn’t being aggressive enough in their strategy or schedule if there are no issues at all.
  • Communicating Problems without Solutions (All bad news): The presenters used the example of the “deeply troubled project,” where it’s late and over budget and problems are blamed on scope creep, low morale, unclear priorities, uncooperative sponsors, and so on. Without a recommended solution and evidence of effective leadership, most executives would lean toward either shutting the project down (ignoring sunk costs) or bringing in a new management team to rescue it and get it back on track.
  • Missing the Value: Commonly, a PMO will communicate its charter and include goals such as delivering successful projects, increasing maturity, standardizing processes and tools, and so on. And any metrics included in the charter focus on things such as quality and timeliness of documents, process compliance, tool adoption, and project success. But there is nothing whatsoever about business value or the “products” of the projects. Executives want to know about business value. They also want to know about accountability. They want to know who’s responsible for what, and whether everyone’s headed in the same direction as a team.

Returning to the overall challenge posed at the beginning of the session — “Delivering projects that provide value in turbulent times” — the presenters cited two enablers: accountability and effectiveness. To achieve these enablers, they suggested focusing on:

  • Reliable results
  • Value-based prioritization
  • Effective leadership
  • Effective communication
  • Organizational Change Management

Overall, I liked their focus on value. As Albert Einstein said, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Too many PMOs are inwardly focused, buried in minutia, and struggle to demonstrate value to the organization. If they looked at every bit of communication and asked “How does this portray value to the organization and relevance to the intended audience?” they’d be a lot better off. I’ll expand on this in future posts.

Also, I’d suggest that slides, charts and graphs need to be effective as well. Information presentation guru Edward Tufte states that effective visual or graphical communication:

  • Encourages comparative analysis
  • Shows causality
  • Explains with annotations
  • Avoids unnecessary noise
  • Avoids distortions

In my next post, I’ll cover Gartner’s third point, how a PMO can help drive competitive advantage and innovation, not stifle it.

Related post: Highlights from Gartner’s PPM and IT Governance Summit — Part 1: The Evolving Role of the EPMO

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Written by Jerry Manas

Jerry Manas is an internationally best-selling author, speaker, and consultant. He is frequently cited by leading voices in the world of business, including legendary management guru Tom Peters (“In Search of Excellence”), who often references Manas’s bestselling book Napoleon on Project Management for its insights on simplicity and character, and Pat Williams, Senior VP of the Orlando Magic, who called Manas’s book Managing the Gray Areas “a new path for leaders.” Jerry’s latest book is The Resource Management and Capacity Planning Handbook (McGraw-Hill), which Judith E. Glaser, noted author of Conversational Intelligence, touted as “the first book dedicated to what is essentially the drivetrain of organizations—the effective use of its people toward its most important activities.” Through his consulting company, The Marengo Group, Jerry helps clients maximize their organizational people resources, leading to a grater capacity to innovate, a more value-focused workforce, and an increased ability to adapt to change. He is a popular speaker at events around the world, speaking on lessons from history, resource planning, organizational change, and other topics. Jerry’s work has been highlighted in a variety of publications, including the Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun Times, National Post, Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, and others.