The document discusses the history and purpose of The Coal Authority. It provides services to governments, organizations, and landowners, and regulates the coal industry in Britain. It manages a long term mining legacy of approaching £3 billion. The document then discusses the Coal Authority's efforts to improve project management from 2014-2018, including establishing processes, educating staff, gaining credibility, and using appropriate resources. It discusses lessons learned and challenges along the way, such as reorganizations, multiple tools used, and reduced capacity. It outlines successes in areas like project planning and control. It concludes by outlining key ongoing challenges such as ensuring dedicated resources and adding value.
3. Our purpose
As a non-departmental public body of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), we
provide services to governments, public bodies, private organisations and landowners.
We also regulate the coal industry in Britain and manage the long term mining legacy approaching £3 billion.
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11. • Portfolio Management & Governance – to ensure right projects, efficiently
progressed
• Project & Programme Management (P2M) Regime – to ensure consistent,
• P3M Office – to support and sustain the Portfolio, Programme & Project
• Project Management Tool (MSPE) – to support the above, improve
• Project Management Community – to develop the expertise of all ‘project
2014 – A New Hope
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13. • Get your ‘offline’ processes right
• Educate your project people
• Gain credibility
• SMART goals/blueprint/ToM
• Use the right resources for your implementation
• Engaged sponsor and business champions
2014 to 2016 -
Lessons Learned
14. Were we successful?
The Phantom
Menace!• Following a re-org, PMO was ‘buried’ in Finance
• Challenge of multiple tools/methodologies (Agile)
• Reduced capacity made it difficult to deliver further improvements
• Perception that the PMO provided little of extra value
• Disheartening for those trying to deliver PMO services
15. Were we successful?
The good stuff!
• Project plans with baselines, resources, highlight reports and risk registers
• Company wide capacity planning
• Expectation of a what a PM skill set involves
• Improving project and programme control
• An appreciation of what it takes to be better
16. 2018 onwards –
The Force Awakens!
• New sponsorship
• More resources to deliver PMO functions
• More realistic delivery timescales
Portfolio Office
Corporate
Programme Office
Operational
Programme Office
17. Key challenges
• PMO resource is ring fenced for PMO activity
• Portfolio Office remain closely aligned with the executive
management team
• Blueprint defined and agreed
• PMO is seen to be adding value
• Sponsor engagement
Our 50% delivery crept up to about 80% and as a consequence we fell into a vicious cycle.
Our sponsor, who believed in a PMO but needed some guidance, was not getting the steer he needed because we didn’t have the capacity, so he was therefore unable to give the PMO the attention and support it required. Without evident sponsor support, we were loosing visibility and credibility. We didn’t have the success record or authority we needed when asking teams to change their practice.
We struggled to define a PMO charter because we could not get enough traction with the project teams to define what services they needed or what we could offer that was of benefit. That, and the demands of project delivery, made it difficult to establish PMO roles, so we struggled to form and maintain an identity as a team and as PMO professionals.
Often staff didn’t understand why they needed to change their practice – they were delivering successfully after all.
You might be thinking – if they were delivering, why bother having a PMO, if no one wants what you are selling, why not just give up?
We knew that projects were being delivered without plans, or without baselines, so of course anything can seem successful if you have nothing to measure it against.
In April 2014 we produced a business case asking for more support. This is what our business case said the PMO was going to deliver.
let them read
We said with some help, we could deliver all of this in 15 months.
Again this proved to be overambitious because the demands of project management did not go away. There was a perception that PMO was a delivery function and we were seen as free project managers or free project support, and this (tool deployment) soon absorbed every spare bit of capacity.
So what did we do? We put Portfolio Management and PM community on the shelf – there was no appetite.
We produced a simple lifecycle (point to regime) and a set of simple rules for all projects to follow (learn these).
And of course we introduced a PM tool - Project Web App or Project Online as it is now called.
We had an office which basically administered and managed Project Web App.
I’d like to talk a bit more detail about the tool implementation.