009: Nudging Organizational Change with Mark Price Perry

PMI Talent Triangle: Business Acumen (Strategic and Business Management) Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers! Today we have a special guest interview with Mark Price Perry, we are talking about nudging organizational change. For all the details (and you don't want to miss them) listen to the full epsiode on your favorite podcast player. Mark is the Catalyst and the Evangelist of the Business Driven PMO. What I love about Mark's perspective, is that he helps PMOs from a consumer or stakeholder of the PMO perspective as opposed to the PMO leader perspective. itself and that's why he can provide so much great insight and different perspective that I think we as PMO leaders need. You can see Mark’s full bio on the PMOIMPACTSummit.com site. Learn the best-kept secrets to creating a PMO that drives IMPACT.  Join us for the PMO IMPACT Summit.Register for FreeNudging Organizational ChangeLaura: What I think really sticks with me from your podcast, your online videos, and sharing multiple stages with you is your mind-blowing topic around business agility, is there anything you'd like to share with our PMO audience about you and your experience? Mark: I’d like to talk about stakeholders and stakeholders in the context of a stakeholder perspective, for me, that's really a watershed moment that I had in that for 20 years, mostly with IBM, I had been involved in program offices and project management offices. Typically I was involved as a stakeholder or as one of the leadership team members served by the office and in the environment, I was in, they were typically frontline environments that were seeking to achieve specific business objectives. Those program offices and project management offices were set up and were instrumental in helping us achieve those specific business objectives. But the way we set those up, in my first 20 years of experience, they were always set up with a specific purpose in mind and a value of achieving that purpose with specific measurements from which the office would be held to account. It was a two-step process, step 1: the leadership team was asked to consider starting a project management office. In that, the leadership team asked why? What are we seeking to achieve? How do we codify that? Then based upon how much it's gonna cost to get this going as an investment,step 2: what's an assessment of the return and that becomes a business case for the project management office. People take a means to the ends view of project management and the PMO specifically. Regrettably, I think that's probably one of the key reasons why so many PMOs struggle in the initial set up. It's not that you don't need people, processes, and tools, but in the rush to get those things going, often times lost or not crafted in the first place was the leadership team's purpose in having the PMO, what they would commit to by way of investment, and the expected return, and then using that information to determine what you actually DO. It's just mind-blowing to me that business people, whether you call them project managers and whether they have a certification or not, would take the position to just advance the means of the ends and the ends to be achieved will find themselves. That started my reputation as maybe being a maverick. The reality is that I'm not a maverick, I'm just driven by business needs, I'm business-driven. That business-driven aspect spawned into the approach that I took and talking about the PMO, are you business-driven or are you driven by some other intention? I have seen some improvement in the last 20 years in that I do believe that on average PMOs are more business-driven today than I saw 20 years ago. Having said that, we're talking about instead of 75% being not business-driven is maybe 60%. There's still a ton of work to be done. Laura: People spend so much time on that setup and the people, process, templates,