By Alex Blench, PMP

The PMI Atlanta Governance Forum hosted a discussion with Kirk Talbott, Deputy CIO for the City of Atlanta. Kirk drove a PMO transition in Lake County, IL and brings his experience standing up PMOs to Atlanta and the Atlanta Governance Forum.

Overview

Building a PMO in an organization where siloes have established their own cultures is no small challenge. In culturally diverse organizations such as a city government, the PM cannot be the only person advocating for change. Kirk underscores the importance of a champion in upper-level management in achieving buy-in from your stakeholders.

  • Keys to success
    o When dealing with large groups, cluster by area of interest. These clusters then elect delegates to represent their teams in the decision making process.
    o Benchmark project completions against prior years to demonstrate value and build consensus.
    o Remove ambiguity by creating criteria for success.
    o Limit Project Inductions to team capacity; keep WIP under control.
    o Gear your solutions to alleviate the pain caused by current processes.

“The cause of the pain that will get people in the room to talk about changing things”

Forum Highlights

Kirk stood up a PMO in 2 years by achieving high level support for his ideas and by adapting his solutions to the needs of the internal stakeholders. His tactics often focused on personal relationships, building consensus, and communicating the advantages of Project-based work over functional workflow. Successful sustainability is dictated by the extent to which internal stakeholders accept change and stick to new processes.

Special thanks to our presenter Kirk Talbott for an engaging discussion and sharing lessons learned from over 24 years of experience IT Governance.

If you would like to learn more about Governance and the value it brings to projects, please join us at a future forum. The calendar can be found on the PMI Atlanta web site at http://www.pmiatlanta.org

Thank you to our sponsors at Global Payments for making this event possible.

About PMI

PMI Atlanta serves project managers in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 4,000 members, PMI Atlanta is the second largest chapter in the US and fifth largest in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.