The three elements of Live PMO and its benefits

In last week’s blog, our experts introduced the concept of Live PMO. This week, we cover in more details the three elements that composes this reorganized new PMO and its benefits.

1.     Digital objectives – digital target
2.     An ecosystem that enables delivery of the objectives – digital arsenal
3.     A team of humans and digital workers to deliver the mission – digital cavalry

1.     Digital Target

A Live PMO can function efficiently and create more synergies when goals are crystal clear.  The target that will help train the digital brain to deliver consistently are as follows

• Productivity: identify improvement areas for service operations efficiency
• Insights: leverage knowledge base to generate actionable insights for the services
• Experience: provide an intuitive that connects everyone, everywhere
• Learn: analyze all systems and user interactions to improve performance and quality

 

2.     Digital Arsenal

Digital arsenal has various digital and physical capabilities that empower a PMO to deliver service effectively. Capabilities are built by leveraging the existing artifacts of PMOaaS and consist of Transformation Suitcase, PMO Hub, and the Smart platform.

• Transformation Suitcase

The suitcase is a collection of processes, tools & templates (delivery structure, standard processes, tools Setup and automation, project artefacts, and standard templates) that will fuel the PMOaaS. The suitcase based on industry best practices of project management and Infosys experience is an important lever to set up PMO operation quickly.

• Smart Platform

The engine of the Live PMO will be a digital brain built with AI Services, observability services, and knowledge graphs. An observability service integrates with the organization’s ecosystem systems and observes everything happening to learn, act and improve.

Zero-latency business processes, which are very responsive, can be established using telemetry and AI services. These services get fueled by the PMO suitcase and integrated ecosystem to drive intelligence in real-time.

• PMO Hub

The intelligence-driven by the platform will get presented to the users through the PMO Hub. PMO Hub is the one-stop shop for the project, and it will serve as a cockpit for driving the project, making them sentient.

The PMO hub will provide a holistic view of the project progress with relevant insights while hosting all project artifacts and information. Project practitioners will use the self-service capabilities of the hub using an intuitive interface.

3.     Digital Cavalry

PMOaaS hub & spoke model is the best way to deliver the service. The hub defines the standards and owns service governance, whereas the tailored project services get provided by the spokes. A team of humans and digital workers is the cavalry that delivers.

Digital workers get powered by the smart platform, and they get assigned to perform repetitive tasks and tasks that require cognitive abilities. With digital workers taking on mundane tasks, the team of humans can focus on fostering a better agile culture, delivering more value to the business, and promoting project management-proven practices.

The Hub & Spoke approach enabled by the smart platform helps with global deployments, and it creates flexibility for consumers of the service to choose the service they want and pay as they consume.

 

Benefits far outweigh the efforts needed to establish a Live PMO

Although the objectives of Live PMO look very ambitious, the benefits of Live PMO far outweigh the efforts; benefits are as follows

• Operational excellence

Live PMO provides accelerators, self-service capabilities, and decision-making tools to speed up the process of engaging stakeholders and will build consensus to arrive at the right project execution decisions with zero latency.

Example: actionable insight on project timelines, delivery quality, and project costs from the smart platform will ensure a lean and efficient way.

• Customer intimacy

In the pursuit of operational excellence, many organizations forsake customer intimacy; However, a one size fits all approach towards excellence does not work in the digital world ; the characteristics of a great customer intimate product are usability, availability, and supportability. The smart platform leverages the computational design process to ensure a customer-centric design by involving consumers

Example: The platform provides individual personalization and self-learning ability capabilities to consumers with training and learnings in the process areas where they are lagging.

• Responsive

Traditional PMOs are generally focused on control, preventing them from becoming responsive, whereas the Live PMOs are enabled by smart platforms making them responsive and proactive. Live PMOs can act quickly and instinctively to the change because they have acute awareness and vigilance to sense the current environment and anticipate unexpected changes.

Example: actions, alerts assigned to the project stakeholders for their action are in the order of relevance because of the smart platform.

• Connected

A PMO is highly responsive when all the systems within the organization are interconnected. An interconnected ecosystem with an observability service will detect how a change in one system impacts the outcomes of another system.

Example: – a purchase order in the contract management system linked to a project starting activities in the Project Management system will alert the stakeholders that the work is at risk if the purchase order remains un-approved.

• Sentient

In the digital world, stakeholders need to make quick decisions, and Live PMOs provide that ability to ensure alignment to the overall strategic objectives. Being sentient is only possible if the ecosystem is interconnected and responsive.

Example: If a new feature or scope is requested, the Product Manager and Product Owner are alerted on the scope change and its impact on the product, which will help them decide on scope change.

 

Conclusion

Live PMOs are now a must for organizations to be successful in the digital world. Their ability to behave like a living organization gives an organization the required flexibility and agility to respond to ever-changing business. The likelihood of realizing the benefits from the organization strategy is much higher than that of traditional PMOs.