Kaizen Program Office

February 03, 2012 11:28 PM | COMMENTS (0) | CATEGORIES: BPM, business process, Business Process Management, certified lean office practitioner, kaizen, Lean, lean ofice, PMO, Portfolio Management Office, Program Management Office, Program Office, Project Management Office | SHARE

• Your PMO is how many hundred people?
• We don't worry about innovation, we alwayshave great products!
• Your all day status meetings have a greatsupply of donuts!
• Our PMO is awesome - total authority but noaccountability!

Over the last 10 years the program management office or PMO has been designed and developed in numerous organizations to be anything and
everything to organizations except add value.

Many PMOs have become kingdoms within organizations building intensive infrastructures only to eventually see that what they have built is so enormous and complex it caused the organization to slow down, did not improved project performance and added unnecessary bureaucracy eventually leading to their failure.

Most PMOs of this type never started up again in the organization; a large loss to those corporations and personnel. In other corporations with PMOs there were several attempts to start new ones under a different name - same pig different color. These changed by watering down their governance and value from the fear of possibly failing again adding no value to the corporation.

Years ago Kaizen was developed by the Japanese after years of learning from Dr. Deming and others. Elements of Kaizen were extracted into what is now called Lean in the American manufacturing environment. Lean is now well recognized in the manufacturing environment and surfaced a few years ago to take on the bureaucratic business process back-end office environment.

PMOs need to take a lesson and start leaning out there organizational structure, processes, procedures and understand the true value they need to assist the corporation with innovation and improved profit.

There is no one single blueprint for the Kaizen Program Office that will fit every type and size of organization. However, there is a basic structure that all PMOs need to follow to design, develop, implement and continuously assess their value. The structure is focused on three major foundational elements: the basic structure of the PMO to fit the organization; administration; and infrastructure and governance. 

The Kaizen Program Office of the future must adhere to the entire Kaizen approach [and not just lean] for an optimized and ever improving structure to fit the environment, enhance innovation and to easily adapt in the future.