100 Roles
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process. Otherwise just having a PMO with senior folks who really
aren’t that interested in it, de nitely didn’t work for us. So the idea of—
you know, our steering committees always have senior management
on them who are well aware of the process we want to follow around
tollgates or certain documents or go/no- go decisions.
Learning- Oriented Culture. Some of the PMO leaders (30 percent) indi-
cated that their organization’s “way of doing business” plays an enabling
role in their e orts to facilitate cross- project learning. Rachel, for example,
discussed how, after three years of evolution in the PMO, her organization
has developed a culture that favors continuous learning:
The only thing I would say is that we always do [lessons learned]. So I
don’t want to overplay that there was this one bad project and we had
to take a step back. I think as good project managers, and given the
structure we’ve put in place, you don’t wait. There’s no ceremony. It’s
just, “Let’s keep looking at what’s going right or wrong here and mak-
ing sure we’re adjusting course.”
Similarly, Mitch described how his organization’s culture also enabled
learning to occur routinely:
[Lessons- learned practices] are culturally engrained. We’ve been doing
those for years, whether it’s on projects, other things, do well/do better
is a cultural norm for us, so there were really no barriers there.
Neutral Facilitator for Lessons- Learned Sessions. One- quarter of the PMO
leaders talked about how having a “neutral facilitator” for lessons- learned
sessions helps to promote a more productive discussion. For some of the
participants, this meant having someone other than the project manager
facilitate the lessons- learned session. For others, it meant ensuring that
the process was run in a fair manner, focusing less on blame and more on
planning how to prevent the problem from recurring. In some cases, the
PMO considered itself more “neutral” and therefore saw itself as being
in a better position to conduct the exercise, and in other cases, an outside
party, possibly a project manager from another team, would be brought in
to perform this function. Patty described in detail how her PMO sta not