Executing a Merger or Other Major Initiative? Get Results Through Execution-Focused Program Management (not Project Administration)

By metre22pro | February 16, 2017

How many of your strategic initiatives achieve the results envisioned? If you are like many organizations, the vast majority of initiatives fail to get results, meet budget expectations or come in on schedule. When taking into account lost revenue, productivity hits and unrealized opportunities, the real costs of having initiatives fall short can take a significant chunk out of your company’s potential earnings and stifle revenue growth.
We’ve worked with hundreds of clients on executing critical business initiatives such as Mergers, Acquisitions and Restructurings. We have regularly observed that it takes more than a clear strategy to execute these initiatives. Success in these endeavors also depends on having the right tools, templates, and approaches to support effective project planning and execution. But, an even bigger ingredient for success is applying the right program management “muscle” to drive resources toward real results like improved profitability, synergy realization or incremental revenue. In our view, too many program and project management efforts are overly focused on administration, templates and forms that don’t add value. So where should the focus be? In our eyes it is the ability to navigate complex dependencies and risks, orchestrate work in cross-functional teams, and drive real decision making that are correlated to success.
If your company has a Program Management Office or Organization (a PMO), it often falls to this group to help ensure the business is focused on those areas that will lead to successful execution. So how does an enterprise PMO best position itself to provide services that support the business in delivering results? First and foremost, the role of the PMO and the resources within needs to be crystal clear. Here’s a few thoughts based on our first-hand experience:

    Project Management Organizations should…      PMO’s should not…
  • Be positioned as a service organization to the business and function leaders who own the critical initiatives (e.g., an Acquisition Integration effort or an IT implementation).
  • Measure their value based on the service-level satisfaction of their internal clients and on the business results achieved through the initiatives.
  • Support the executive team in prioritizing potential initiatives and allocating resources by providing a view of the entire portfolio of initiatives and investments.
  • Serve business leaders by providing program management (PM) resources armed with standard project management tools for governance design, chartering, planning, executing, decision making, providing transparency and assessing risks and who know how to apply those tools to get results. The know-how on application of the tools is critical. Otherwise, the PMO is simply providing project journalists – not Project Managers, and likely adding a layer of unnecessary “overhead.”
  • Become a separate or duplicative path for reporting on an initiative’s progress or issues to the executive team. That reporting should come from the business owners (enabled by information collected, analyzed and summarized by the assigned PM resources).
  • Apply the entire toolbox of PM tools to every single project or initiative. There has to be some flexibility based on project size and a desire by the PMs to apply only the tools that will add value.
  • Measure success solely through on-time, on-budget metrics to the exclusion of business performance indicators.
  • Build a giant organization on the assumption that all projects require a PM resource and PMO support. Some projects are just not complex enough or strategic enough to require a PM. The PMO must pick and choose their priority programs to support and also leverage outside resources to help program manage efforts when there is a “surge” of initiatives.

With the role of the PMO function clear and agreed upon among the executive team, the PMO is now positioned to help leaders drive successful corporate initiatives like mergers, acquisitions, restructurings and technology efforts.

Posted in Blog, Mergers & Acquisitions, Strategy and tagged , , ,