I recently attended an industry conference on PPM in Orlando. At the conference I talked with many large companies who have bought PPM solutions at the “corporate” level and are frustrated. One corporate CIO’s story was something like this:
Five years ago we were sold a “site license” to one of the big PPM vendor’s products. We were promised the grand vision of a single corporate IT dashboard that would bring all of our projects, resources, time, requests, etc all into one place. This would allow us to make the most optimal business decisions about new corporate initiatives, staffing and resource allocation, and duplicate project elimination.
Our ambition was to roll out the product from the corporate IT organization into all the departmental IT organizations within a year. We established a corporate PMO, held meetings with divisional representatives, established standards and processes, configured the software, trained the people, etc, etc.
Five years later I still don’t have my single corporate IT dashboard. People in the divisions are screaming that this “thing” hurts them rather than helps them in doing their jobs. Many of them are saying they don’t know what benefit they’re getting out of it. And I keep spending more and more money on the software vendor keeping the product upgraded.
In doing some digging on this topic I called a friend of mine (to remain anonymous) who is the project manager at a very, very large bank. I knew that this bank had a similar story around a large corporate PPM initiative and I wanted to get the story from someone “in the trenches.”
To further set the stage, this friend of mine is one of the best PM’s I’ve seen … he worked with me at one of my previous companies and is a phenomenal manager, communicator, and team player. As a “user in the trenches” of this software package, he was extremely frustrated. All he did was put data into the package and never get anything out. The funny thing is that’s not what he complained about … what he said was that he was happy to be the good “corporate citizen” and put data into this black hole (his words) provided that someone at corporate could tell him how this was benefiting the company (nobody could). Hence his frustration.
While
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a truly successful “large corporate
PPM” initiative, I’ve heard of many successful
“division-of-large-company” PPM successes. These
are divisions of large companies who have adopted PPM at the division
level and then rolled up the results to the corporate parent through
reports or data feeds.
Perhaps the “large corporate PPM” initiative doesn’t work? The issues involved in change management, cross-divisional standards/processes, and user adoption are just too complex?
Perhaps the answer is in the concept of “bottom up.” Let the divisions implement their own solutions and then roll up the data into a corporate data mart?
Corporate America
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