Episode 159: Business Driven PMO Setup; Chapter 7 - PMO Leadership: MBWA 2.0

This week The PMO Podcast™ Featured Story introduces, “Business Driven PMO Setup; Chapter 7 - PMO Leadership: MBWA 2.0” 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 7 goes like this. There is a picture of a PMO manager talking to two members of the team. The PMO manager says, “I just finished a book on MBWA. It said that performance and morale will improve the more I stop by, tell a joke, and who some interest. Think it will work?” One of the team members asks, “Let’s hear the joke?” The other team member quips back, “I think we just did.” As this cartoon satirically illustrates, even the best of leadership techniques can go awry when applied ineffectively. Management, by its very nature, lends itself to meetings, many of them. For many organizations, meetings are the way in which information is formally communicated and shared. They are necessary. But while meetings serve a purpose and can be beneficial, too many meetings can be time consuming and overly taxing to an organization. Good managers seek to hold meetings to a minimum and one way to do that is to employ management techniques that enable management to continually get the information they need and to stay on top of the workplace without having to call a meeting every other day just to stay informed. Enter Managing By Walking Around. But, in order to be effective and to meet the business and technical challenges of today’s PMOs, the traditional approach to MBWA needs an upgrade. In keeping with popular nomenclature, let’s call it MBWA 2.0. MBWA 2.0 needs to provide not only the time tested management technique of managing by walking around but also it needs to address the opportunity for situational leadership and the opportunity to take advantage of current Web 2.0 technologies. The PMO Podcast™ Points Memo suggests, “Take a moment to see things through the eyes of others." Have you followed the gantthead discussion posted by Don Kim about the PMBOK v4 text on agile? Don posted the text and asked for feedback on what others thought. A few Agile folks were perturbed by the text suggesting that PMI has yet to step outside its PMBOK world and acknowledge such things as Agile. PMBOK defenders were quick to chine in stating that PMI is responding to Agile and will be launching a formal component dedicated to Agile Project Management this fall at the Agile Conference. But, I believe the winner in the debate and discussion by a long shot was an anonymous poster. Have a listen and let me tell you why. The PMO Podcast™ Mailbag answers a listener question about putting together a snazzy PMO dashboard for the CIO. 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.