Last week I became an OPM3® Certified Consultant. After spending almost three years as the Deputy Project Manager with the volunteer team developing OPM3 Second Edition, I spent a week taking the OPM3 Certified Consultant course and passed the final exam. I have received a lot of questions about what that means and whether there is any value in it. There are about 100 OPM3 Certified Consultants in the world. I want to talk about OPM3, project management standards, getting organizationally mature, and what being an OPM3 Certified Consultant means. This might not sound exciting, but hang with me. There are very few organizations that won’t benefit from getting better at implementing strategy.

What is OPM3?

OPM3 is a standard that was first published in December of 2003 by the Project Management Institute. OPM3 stands for Organizational Project Management Maturity Model. Per PMI, “Organizational project management is the systematic management of projects, programs, and portfolios in alignment with the achievement of strategic goals. The concept of organizational project management is based on the idea that there is a correlation between an organization’s capabilities in Project Management, Program Management, and Portfolio Management, and the organizations effectiveness in implementing strategy.”

[There is some conflict in the terms process and capability. I will use the term capability consistently through my discussion. A capability describes “what you do and why you do it”. A process describes “how”. PMI doesn’t describe “how” in their standards even though they call them processes.]

To put this simply, organization’s have to implement changes in their structure, processes, management practices, and/or technology to implement a strategy. This is difficult but there are some capabilities that have been show to support them in consistently implementing these changes.  These capabilities can be categorized into effectively and efficiently executing projects, the coordination of multiple projects to optimize resource utilization and project performance, and deciding which projects are the best ones for the organization to invest in based on the organizations strategy. These are Project Management, Program Management, and Portfolio Management respectively. OPM3 uses the capabilities identified in PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge-4^th Edition, The Standard for Program Management-Second Edition, and The Standard for Portfolio Management-Second Edition. More on standards in a minute.

OPM3 wraps a continuous process improvement approach around these capabilities. For example, when implementing a project you probably want to manage the scope of the project. Within most organizations -most of the time, that means you have to gather requirements, define the scope of the project, and create a work plan when planning a project. There are a lot of different ways to do this. It may make sense on some projects to do this once at the start of the project and on other projects, you should do it iteratively and in progressively more detail. What organizations that are good at executing strategy do is they define how they are going to manage scope. Then they pay attention to how well this works continue to improve their method over time. This is organizationally mature.  OPM3 breaks the capabilities down into Standardize, Measure, Control, and Improve.

OPM3 also includes a set of Organizational Enablers. These are the capabilities that must exist in an organization to support the implementation and ongoing existence of Project Management capabilities. These include things like project management training, project management sponsorship, and other structural, cultural, technological and human resource practices.

You can pick up a copy of the OPM3 standard from PMI’s website for about $100. This standard describes the approach in detail, lists all the capabilities, and includes a nice Self Assessment tool in the appendix.

Project Management Standards

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) is a catalog of capabilities (called “processes” by PMI)  related to the management of projects. When the first OPM3 standard was published, PMI had not published standards for Portfolio Management or Program Management.  These first versions came out in 2006 and have been significantly updated with the simultaneous release of new Editions of the standards for Project, Program, Portfolio, and OPM3 in December of 2008.

The new standards provide a comprehensive catalogue of the capabilities that cover Project, Program, and Portfolio Management. These standards show the capabilities that will work in most organizations most of the time. They are based on years of research and the input of thousands of volunteers. They give examples of existing practices within the capabilities.  Despite what some critics claim, they don’t tell you “how” to implement those capabilities, just “what” you should be thinking about. They also don’t tell you to do all the capabilities whether they make sense for you or not, follow a high ceremony waterfall process, or make the purpose of the organization about project management.

Getting Mature

Maturity is an interesting concept. It has a lot of meanings. Mature can be a show you wouldn’t like your kids to watch, a bill of exchange that is due, or a ripe or fully aged piece of fruit. The definition of maturity I am using here is fully developed. What makes organizational project management maturity an interesting concept in business is that fully developed is different in almost every business. It can also change over time within an organization as the needs for project management change.  The key to organizational project management maturity is not to try to implement every capability with a robust set of process maturity. But to implement the capabilities that are right for helping a specific organization implement their specific strategy. This includes implementing an appropriate level of continuous improvement and only the necessary organizational enablers.

I have written about this focused approach to improving project management performance here and here. Invest when it improves the organizations ability to drive value. The goal is not to get better at project management, it is to get better at profitably delivering value to your customers. Project Management maturity efforts should be tied directly to business results.

 OPM3 Certified Consultant

An OPM3 Certified Consultant isn’t just someone who understands the OPM3 standard. Just to get into the course OPM3 Certified Consultant course you must demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of the OPM3 standard through completion of a SAM assessment or an OPM3 fundamentals course. An OPM3 Certified Consultant has demonstrated significant program or project management experience, since a PMP or PgMP is an eligibility requirement. An OPM3 Certified Consultant also has significant assessing and/or consulting experience.

Once in the course, the consultant is trained on the OPM3 assessment methodology and tool set, and the improvement methodology and tool set. This is during an intense four day training course. The consultant must successfully complete an exam.  The handbook that walks you through this process can be found at the PMI website.

The Value of OPM3 Certified Consultants

Most businesses can benefit from getting better at executing their strategy. Improving Organizational Project Management Maturity is a method of improving the organization ability to execute their strategy. OPM3 provides a systematic approach to identify and implement Organizational Project Management improvements appropriate to each business. Project Management Maturity is a tricky thing – it requires insight and experience to focus improvements in project management so it improves the organizations ability to deliver value to its customers. An OPM3 Certified Consultant has an assessment and improvement methodology, a robust tool set, and has demonstrated the experience with identifying and implementing improvements based on PMI’s standards.

For me, the value of the certification includes the assessment and improvement methodology training I received, the time I have spent with other experienced Organization Project leaders, access to the assessment and improvement tools provided by PMI, and some branding. I can combine this with my experience in software development and IT Operations excellence and cost optimization to rapidly deliver value to organizations. For organizations looking for a way to rapidly improve the performance of thier projects, an OPM3 certified consultant with proven experience and expertise in your domain is a good option. Guided by a proven systematic approach, they can perform an assessment and create an improvement roadmap and tie the improvements to your business results. 

I have been having a lot of discussions lately with Mike Cottmeyer over at www.leadingagile.com about scaling Agile to the Enterprise. Today he has a great post, Teams are the Building Blocks of Agile. Mike is exactly right. In fact, teams are the building blocks of organizations. And promises are the glue between the teams. In realms of uncertainty such as knowledge work and software development, Donald Sull would say to focus on Promises over Process.

Managing the promises in an organization is called Promise-based Management. The primary idea in Promise-based management is that work moves through organizations based on a network of promises. And that the better the promising is, the faster the work will move. The whole business is a network of “if you can do this”, then “I can do this” promises. When this network works well, the business improves its ability to profitably create value for the customer. We can improve the performance of the network by improving the reliability of the promises made between teams in the organization.

If you read Mike’s post from a certain perspective, it sounds like Mike is saying the purpose of the organization is to make life easier for the developer’s. That isn’t what he is saying, though.  He is saying that for an Agile team to keep its promise, you have to set the Agile team up to be successful by providing the appropriate context and coordination.

The promise the agile development team makes is to rapidly produce high quality software for use by the business. This is probably so the business can keep the promises it makes to its customers and stakeholders. The Agile development team is willing and able to make these promises when the <Product Owner>Product Manager, Project Manager, Designer, Subject Matter Expert, Business Stakeholder, Business Analyst</Product Owner> is able to set the table for the team by getting the proper context and coordination in place. Mike defines this part of the promise on his blog. This context and coordination effort is the “If you can do this” part of the promise that the Product Owner and Agile development team make.

Once we set the Agile development team up for success, they will be able to much more rapidly produce high quality software for use by the business. The new capability to keep this promise opens up a whole new set of promises we can make to the customer. Exploiting this new capability is not just about software development, it requires us understand impact on the other processes, promises and teams in the organization. Scaling Agile to the organization isn’t about software development. It is about fundamentally changing the promises we can make to our customers.

Check out “Promise-based Management: The Essence of Execution” in Harvard Business Review. Glen Alleman talks about the HBR article. Hal Macomber’s site is a rich resource practical application of promises and promising and making work ready. Clarke Ching’s site is an excellent source of the application of promised based management to software development.

There is a lot of interesting conversation going on within the project management, product management, and agile software development communities. There is contention between (and within) the different communities regarding the value and benefit from the other domains. Sometimes one community is vying to prove their domain is superior to the others. Other times, a community is casting blame for limitations in their ability to perform to another domain. Much of the conversation is based on a limited understanding of what the other domains actually do. They also fall into the trap of generalizing a specific unpleasant experience to encompass the intent of the other community.

I believe this debate is counterproductive. At the end of the day, everyone’s interest should be to improve their organization’s ability to profitably create value for the customer. Each of these areas has something critical to contribute to this goal – but the benefits are only realized when the communities work together. I want to define a few terms, identify the overlap, and then suggest why this discussion is not just an academic exercise, but it an important part of the maturing of each domain.

First, some definitions:

Project Management

Let’s start with Project Management. The Project Management Institute has the following definitions of project, project management and project manager.

Project: A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a uique product, service or result.

Project Management: The application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.

Project Manager: Person assigned by the performing organization to achieve the project objectives.

Project Management is not meant to be an obstacle to getting work done. In fact, the project manager is responsible for ensuring the project is successful.

Product Management

The Product Development and Management Association define product, product management and product manager.

Product: A term used to describe all goods, services, and knowledge sold. Products are bundles of attributes (features, functions, benefits, and uses) and can be either tangible, as in the case of physical goods, or intangible, as in the case of those associated with service benefits, or can be a combination of the two.

Product Management: Ensuring over time that a product or service profitably meets the needs of customers by continually monitoring and modifying the elements of the marketing mix, including: the product and its features, the communications strategy, distribution channels and price.

Product Manager: The person assigned responsibility for overseeing all of the various activities that concern a particular product.

So the Product has an ongoing aspect to it that the Project doesn’t. The Product Manager decides what needs to be built and also how the organization will sell it and support it.

A product has a life that lasts beyond any individual project.  The ongoing thing over at PMI is called a Program. Here is the PMI definition for Program and Program Management. Interestingly, PMI doesn’t define Program Manager in the Program Management standard.

Program: A group of related projects managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits and control not available from managing them individually, Programs may include elements of related work outside of the scope of the discrete projects in the program.

Program Management: The centralized coordinated management of a program to achieve the program’s strategic objectives.

Project Management Isn’t Product Management

So project management isn’t product management. Neither is Program Management, However, there are projects to execute in the modifying of the product, so project management processes matter in product management.  Here is a Venn diagram that describes the relationship.

If you aren’t good at making changes to your product or the capabilities in your organization that relate to your product, you won’t be a successful company. So project management isn’t product management, but there is overlap in practices and both are important to your organization. Great ideas with no execution aren’t valuable.

Agile Software Development

Finally, let’s go with the Agile Manifesto as a definition of Agile.

Manifest for Agile Software Development

• Individual and Interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Despite the perspective of many in the project management and product management communities, Agile is also not intended to be no planning, no documentation, irresponsible software development. According to http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html :

 “The Agile movement is not anti-methodology; in fact, many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modeling, but not in order to file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository. We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes. We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a turbulent environment.”

Agile is not Product Management

Agile is specifically about software development. In fact, the Agile Manifesto is short for the proper title of Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Agile is an approach to software development that includes practices and principles that can result in dramatically faster and higher quality (therefore less expensive) development of software. But the product is not just software. If the right features, communications strategy, distribution channels and price are established being faster, cheaper, and better at software development doesn’t matter. Product Management is critical to getting value from Agile Software Development.

Agile is not Project Management

 In very few cases is the product that is being sold to an organization’s customers just software. We’ve discussed the relationship of Project and Product Management above.  You need to be good at Project Managing all aspects of change to the product and the capabilities in the organization that support and are affected in any way by the sale, delivery, billing, and support of the product to the customer. Also, Agile isn’t concerned with Procurement – but procurement is important to the profitability of the company. And while iterations are a Risk Mitigation tool, Agile does not have a specific Risk Mitigation aspect to it.

Why this discussion matters

The following Venn diagram depicts the interdependency between these three domains.  Value is not delivered by any one of these domains. It is through an effective coordination between these domains that value is delivered to the customer. Value is identified, shaped, and then communicated to the customer by Product Management. Much value is created by the Agile development team itself. Value is created through aligning the other capabilities within the organization and often actually delivering the product to the customer through Project Management.

Let me quote Jim Highsmith from http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html again.

“In order to succeed in the new economy, to move aggressively into the era of e-business, e-commerce, and the web, companies have to rid themselves of their Dilbert manifestations of make-work and arcane policies. “

Most of the organization’s that I have been involved with that are failing to deliver software to the business or the business’ customers are failing to receive value because of deficiencies in one or all of the domains in this discussion. Often, the deficiencies are the result of conflict and lack of coordination with another domain. Becoming great at one area, while remaining poor in another, is not value to the customer, the business, or ultimately to the members of the organization. 

The discussion we need to be having is not about how each domain contributes to problems for the other domain.  This is an interdependent problem, not one that has its roots in any one domain. Bunkering down, defending incompatible practices, focusing on local optimization at the expense of the business is not going to work. We need to work together to answer this question. How do we align the product management and project management practices with the rapid, incremental delivery of working software to optimize benefits for our customers and profitability for our businesses?

This is a slightly updated presentation of a talk I gave at Atlanta’s Project Developer Days a few years ago. After attending a two day training session with Jeff Sutherland, I believe that this concept is relevant to the Agile and SCRUM Project Management conversation.  From my experience, improving the performance of the conversations on your projects greatly improves the performance of the project team. When we say we want to get better at communications, I believe we want to improve the quality and effectiveness of the project conversations. The project managers job in leading projects requires us to be good at recognizing what conversations need to take place, and facilitating them to a successful conclusion.

If you aren’t familiar with the story of The Blind Men and The Elephant it is about six blind men that go to study an elephant. When they come back, they all report on the elephant in different ways. They variously report they found a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, and a length of rope. They argue to defend their perspective. The discrepancy lies in the fact that each studied a different part of the elephant. The poem and the related illustrations at the link above demonstrate the story very well. The story is a metaphor about how we see the world from our individual perspective and have a difficult time understanding the bigger picture.

Delivering software and technology is a lot like that elephant. Over my career, I have been the blind man trying to figure that elephant out. I wrote code for the first decade, then began to study what great code and then architecture looked like. I joined user groups and associations and studied the engineering practices around software development. I studied function point counting and became a member of IFPUG. In the mid 1990’s Senge and Ackoff seeded my Systems Thinking perspective. My work at Perot Systems shaped my Business Process Re-engineering perspective. My degree is in Organizational Psychology and Development and I have been fascinated with the role language, knowledge creation, and team dynamics play in this area. I first read “The Goal” and “Critical Chain” in 1998 and have studied and applied the TOC thinking processes and CCPM to project scheduling. I have been greatly influenced by Theory of Constraints thinking. I have been around Agile development for over 10 years. I have a bookshelf full of eXtreme Programming and Agile books. I am also very involved with the project management institute as well, earning my PMP in 1998 and I spent the last couple years as the Deputy Project Manager of the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model - OPM3®.   I earned my Lean Value Stream Mapping certification from the Lean Enterprise Institute in 1999.

In each of these cases I went into the community trying to learn what they had to offer and figuring out how to responsibly help companies profitably deliver technology. One of the interesting things I have consistently observed is the disdain these communities hold for most of the other communities.  I was at an Architecture conference in 1991 where the various OOAD people were actually yelling about the best way to identify objects for a system. The TOC and Agile people really dislike the PMI people. Even inside the Agile community, the Lean and Agile groups are at each other’s throats. Engineers discount the human elements and the softer side of team dynamics.  Everyone is arguing for the importance of their view of the elephant. High ceromony scoff at the lack of maturity of the low ceromony while the low ceromony ridicule the waste of heavy and useless process and artifacts.

The problem is that the answer is not one particular part of the elephant. No one is completely right. We need to optimize the entire elephant and turn it into a sleek and agile race-horse. The battles between whether the elephant is a tree or a fan or a snake are not productive. They obscure the path to improving the ways that we can responsibly and profitably deliver value to our customers.

I spent last week at a course with Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of SCRUM. The SCRUM he talks about is different than what I have seen on many SCRUM teams or read in books. Jeff incorporates aspects from Theory of Constraints, and Lean, and Knowledge Management. He promotes the items in the Agile Manifesto but incorporates elements from everything he has learned and observed. Jeff is trying to build a “big-tent” approach that brings responsible practices together while increasing performance and developing hyper-productive teams.

I encourage each of us to recognize our myopia in understanding this elephant. Try to understand the basic principles behind each practice and idea. Let’s agree that the way organization’s identify, manage, create, and deliver technology to organizations and customers is insufficient and put a lot more energy into improving. Technology plays a very important role in our economy today. We can’t get good enough fast enough right now, and dogmatic wars are too costly. What can we be doing to rapidly cross-pollinate and greatly improve our ability to profitably deliver value to our customers?

I was reading a post by http://pauldrasmussen.blogspot.com/2009/02/project-management-so-what-is-project.html. While I don’t agree with everything in the post, I like the point made that project management is an art and a science.  There is art in being effective when you have a temporary role and you are responsible for the leadership of change within an organization

My Dad is a physicist. Back in the mid 1960’s he worked at NASA as a contractor. They hired physicists to do engineering work because there weren’t clearly understood engineering principles around building rocket ships to go to outer space. They were figuring these out as they went. So Rocket Science at the time was part science and part art. I think we are pretty good at engineering rocket ships now. In fact, you can get a degree in engineering that teaches the principles they were proving in the 1960’s.

Project Management is where rocket science was back in the 1960’s. Theoretically we can get complex organizational projects done. Some people have even done them well.  But many of them have not been successful and the practices are not fully proven. Project Management is a science and an art.  It took 20-30 years for rocket science to move from theory to science to engineering.  Where are we on the spectrum in project management for organizations today?

Businesses today are under tremendous financial strain. They are also under pressure to respond to customer demands, competitive threats, and market conditions fast enough to survive. Projects are the method of creating change in the organization to deal with these challenges. Studies show that projects are late, over budget, and fail to deliver the expected benefit over half the time in most organizations. This results in a waste of money, management attention, and energy. We can’t afford this waste anymore – and we can’t afford to not respond to the challenges. So how can companies rapidly reduce the failure rates of projects?

Here are five strategies to implement that will result in reduced failure rates and a much higher return you business investments.

1. Treat projects like promise the business makes to itself. Projects aren’t done “to” a business – they are done within the business. A project is like making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight. Define a clear goal, realign the majority of your activities and decisions in support of this goal, and hold the entire organization accountable for achieving the goal. If the organization waits for the project do be done to them, it is very likely to fail.

2. Focus on the right projects. Not all improvement activities improve the organizations ability to achieve its strategy. Don’t expend dollars, management attention, and performer effort on everything that can be done better. Improve at key capabilities that improve performance for the business. Finishing a project that doesn’t result in business value is a waste. As Drucker said, “results only exist on the outside”.

3. Set the project delivery team up for success. Implementing any change is difficult – Implementing big change, in a changing market, while doing many other projects, is a recipe for failure. Reduce complexity by simplifying and laser focusing projects, reducing the number of active projects, and reducing time to business benefit for the projects. Smaller projects more focused projects with less competition for resources will finish faster. Remember, it’s not how quickly you start projects it is how quickly you finish them.

4. Responsibly govern projects. Too much project management is a bad thing, but not enough is irresponsible. At a minimum, project communications, effective forward planning, progress verification, process discipline (and adaptability) and active management of risks and opportunities should be in place. The trend towards agile methods does not mean undisciplined process or no formal planning. Good project management will help accelerate the completion of the project without being overly bureaucratic.

5. Understand Talent Management. Projects are done by people and often impact the way people will do their jobs. As simple as this concept is it is often overlooked. If you are doing new technology, make sure you have experienced talent involved in developing the technology. If you are changing the way someone does work, make sure they have the right talent for the new job and train them. Accounting on a Double Ledger paper system requires different skills than the one required to run a computerized financial system. Failure to get the right people in the right place will result in a failure to optimized value from the project.

For various reasons, most organizations are ineffective at each of these strategies. But if we want to get different results, we need to take a different approach. With a little effort, each of these strategies can be implemented rapidly. Implementing them will greatly enhance the likelihood of the success of your projects. I will go into detail on each of the strategies over the next week.

This is my first podcast. Merry Christmas.