Episode 158: Business Driven PMO Setup; Chapter 6 - Executive Reporting: Keep It Simple

This week The PMO Podcast™ Featured Story introduces, “Business Driven PMO Setup; Chapter 6 - Executive Reporting: Keep It Simple” presented by Mark Perry (about Mark), host of The PMO Podcast™. Each chapter of the book starts off with a cartoon and the cartoon in Chapter 6 goes like this. There is a picture of a CIO talk to the PMO manager and one of the project managers. The CIO says, “I don’t like this report. I just want a simple dashboard that shows the status of the important projects. Can you give me that?” The PMO manager answers, “Sure, what status criteria do you want and what determines if a project is important?” Hearing the reply, the project manager chuckles to himself in instant message speak, “I think I am going to ROTF and LOL now!” For those of you not familiar with instant message speak, ROTF LOL is Rolling on the Floor Laughing Out Loud. For many organizations and not just PMOs, this cartoon portrays an all too familiar situation. In today’s busy organizations, management and the leadership team need to be kept informed in order to provide the executive oversight for which they are responsible as well as to step in and exercise their decision making authorities as appropriate for the project portfolio at hand. Yet, far too often, executive reporting does not meet this need. In some cases, the reports provided to executives though well intended are simply too detailed and provide too much of the wrong information and not enough of the right information. In other cases, executive reporting is overly graphic to the point of being flashy and more focused on looking like the dashboard of F-16 fighter jet than on providing the summary and control information needed by the executive and leadership team. Consider the dilemma faced by Harold, the new PMO manager for a regional health care provider. The PMO Podcast™ Points Memo warns, “Beware of anyone claiming to have an online real-time PMO dashboard." If you are like me, sometimes you hear, over and over, project management buzz or PM community speak that just doesn’t make any sense, but all of a sudden it is the latest craze. For me, a term that I find quite perplexing is the online real-time PMO dashboard. For example, In The Complete Project Management Office Handbook, Gerald Hill (2008) writes, “The executive dashboard can be viewed as a condensed and graphical representation of the project status report in real-time.” There are several flaws with this thinking. Let me give you three that come to mind. The PMO Podcast™ Mailbag answers a listener question about a project manager that can get estimates from a developer with an attitude. The PMO Podcast™ is sponsored by BOT International, the provider of Processes On Demand, a PMO Setup solution used by more than 1,000 companies.Request a Demo LoginThe PMO Podcast™ is a trademark of BOT International. The PMO Podcast™ and its RSS feed are copyright © by BOT International 2013. All rights reserved.