The world of project management is rapidly evolving, with an increasing emphasis on the role of the PMO in enterprise transformation. At the same time, automation is dominating conversations about the future of work. Which begs the question—how can today’s project managers leverage automation to drive maximum value for their organizations?
With many years of experience in working with enterprise customers to unlock transformational value , Blumhorst and Derbyshire have decades of experience driving digital transformation through Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Professional Services Automation (PSA) across industries and companies.
The two sat down with PM Today’s Associate Editor Amy Hatton for a webinar on how to automate, scale, and adapt to unlock transformational value across an organization. Register for the webinar, and learn all about their insights below.
Key Transformation Challenges
Picture this: You’re in a meeting to address challenges across the PMO and certain issues keep being raised.
- You have no enterprise-wide visibility of what’s getting done, which means your outcomes are being mismeasured, and you have no clear ROI for your work. There’s a disconnect between strategy and delivery, which means teams are working on the wrong things and missing deadlines because of unseen dependencies and constraints.
- You’ve implemented agile ways of working at a team level, but as an enterprise, you’re still slow to market and are having trouble reacting to changes. Fragmented tools, processes, and data are creating broken feedback loops, and you’re unable to replan quickly and effectively.
Does any of this sound familiar? You’re not alone. As Blumhorst and Derbyshire lay out in their webinar, these issues are facing project practitioners worldwide, who have to contend with a rapidly evolving world of project management, at a time when PMOs are leading digital transformation efforts while adding automation into their work.
To solve these challenges, you’ll first have to prioritize and focus on what matters most by balancing your strategic work with day-to-day non-strategic work .
Balancing Strategic Priorities
Blumhorst and Derbyshire often meet with clients who focus on the present, without considering future value points and outcomes.
As they explain in their webinar, they know that balancing strategic priorities can be difficult—they often hear from clients who can’t reprioritize their work quickly enough to respond to market changes, who drift away from their strategic work in the face of day-to-day challenges, and who end up making uninformed decisions with limited information.
But, they also have clients who are able to successfully balance their strategic priorities through well-thought-out processes and automation, and they quickly see the benefits. They’re able to restrategize using leading indicators, make investments tied to their strategy, and can make data-driven decisions using real-time scenario planning.
The difference between the clients who struggle and those who succeed often comes down to how they manage their outcomes and capabilities.
Outcomes and Capabilities
Many clients come to Blumhorst and Derbyshire with a particular problem, but often don’t think about the outcomes before they decide on what software solution they are trying to implement.
Blumhorst and Derbyshire suggest that, when considering what software solution to use, whether PPM or PSA, you must first think about your desired internal and external outcomes.
For instance, if your desired outcomes are more internal, include meeting your portfolio objectives, creating higher stakeholder satisfaction, and realizing benefits faster, the right PPM solution can help you get there by creating better roadmapping, cost management, and benefits realization.
Similarly, if your outcomes are having more deals won, higher customer satisfaction, and higher margins, the right PSA solution can help with improved opportunity planning, revenue and cost planning, and multiple business model support.
Of course, not every PMO has considered working with a PSA before. In the webinar, Blumhorst and Derbyshire dig into automation and what it could mean for the future of project management, whether you’re focused on delivering external or internal work.
Automation and Intelligence
Automation is dominating conversations about the future of work. Across industries and departments, fears are being voiced that human roles may become obsolete as automation begins to play a more visable role in our day-to-day lives.
But the truth is, as Blumhorst and Derbyshire make clear in their webinar, human judgment will remain essential to the work of the PMO. When done right, automation allows project practitioners to stay focused on higher-value work instead of getting bogged down in manual administrative tasks.
Ultimately, people will still be the ones making judgment calls based on the data they’ve been provided. But automation will help them make proactive decisions instead of working from a reactive framework. The right combination of PPM and PSA software can unlock this value for PMOs.
The Big Takeaways
So, what were the main takeaways Blumhorst and Derbyshire had for PMOs?
- Transformation happens top-down: Do your due diligence and encourage executive stakeholder buy-in to the PMO’s value.
- Ensure your capacity, resources, and skills are locked in: Ideas are great, but do you have everything you need to complete your transformation?
Register for the on-demand webinar to hear Blumhorst and Derbyshire’s full insights on this important topic.
