(no subject)
Недавно я писал письмо для студентов бывшего научного руководителя о моем первом рабочем опыте в проектном офисе тут в Москве. Скопирую его сюда.
The text is about the meeting between PMO and HR offices that has recently been organised in the firm I work for in Moscow. It could be a useful read for students as it describes the case of how projects could be managed in contemporary large organisations and what problems come up.
Before I describe the meeting itself, though, I'd like to dwell a little on the context, which is key to understanding what happened. I'd like to believe, though, that my approximation of the REAL WORLD is close to the worst case scenario and a reader has good chance of getting into a better environment.
About the firm
The firm is in generation and wholesale of electrical energy and is a big player on local market, most successful amongst its competitors. Due to the expected shrinking of the market in the coming years several optimisation projects have been started.
MMPE or planning and aligning several projects with the purpose of achieving business strategic goals
There are 3 projects running at the moment:
* EBPM (enterprise business process modelling) focused on formalisation and optimisation of the processes running in the company;
* One Company, aimed at unification of the core processes across all the international branches of the firm and
* Generation Staff Restructuring, you guessed it right, focused at firing as many people as possible from headquarters office working within the very core function of the firm -- generation (too many managers).
You can now try and exercise your mind by telling why the three projects described above might inhibit each other's chances for successful delivery. I'd be glad to read your thoughts on this.
Being flexible about the plan is essential.
Interesting thing about the last project -- generation staff restructuring -- the first interim deadline was in November and the project must have been started in spring last year. So instead they've started it IN OCTOBER (reasons unknown) and the deadline has not been moved. So instead of 5 months they had 1 month for the first stage of the project. Guess what has been compromised? Budget? Quality? I bet the latter, but really, have no idea, they just did it somehow. As mentioned in the title “Being flexible about the plan is essential.”
PPMC or project management expertise as absolute must in a contemporary organisation.
Despite the fact that we do have an entity called project office (which I am a part of) and the fact that we have a complicated set of projects running RIGHT NOW, project management methodology is very far from being commonly adopted, even worse, no one demonstrates any knowledge of structured PM or admits the fact that maybe it would be useful to read something on it. One of my co-workers has recently recommended me to read PMBOK as a standard for change management.
I have to be fair, though, I've heard words "communication plan", "project charter", "Gantt chart", "project schedule", "project budget" several times from my boss , the project manager, but none of it is being actually used, except for one tool, monitoring table, which lists all the works, responsibles (that's right, it's plural) and deadlines with current statuses.
One of our directors also told me, and I it was hard to keep myself from giggling, that PM expertise is essential and absolute must in our organisation. He then promised that PROPER PMO is to be developed in the near future.
It might have been a conscious decision to avoid the planning and monitoring routine and not to use the formal structure of project management for the current projects (which might happen when projects are very small and simple) but with the mess we are currently in, I doubt it is the case.
Change management or (not very) productive chaos
Short message to Dea Nichols:
Dear Dea, if only I knew! If only I knew how change management is an absolute key for the internal projects and that very soon after finishing your module I will wake up utterly confused in the jumble of one! Oh, God knows, I'd read more on how to get people on the change boat and take them far across the chaotic environment towards the bright envisioned future! Because right now that knowledge would have saves lots of nerves!
End of message.
The Firm now seem to be in complete mess, Project Sponsors (somewhere high up in central office in Italy) are nowhere to be found. By Project sponsors I hereby mean those peculiar characters who initiated the project and who are primarily interested in its success, or, in short, those, who actually need it. I will come back to it, but it now seems like across all levels of the corporation, there is no one entity, which performs the project-related tasks with enthusiasm, so it's hard to imagine anyone who actually needs this project to be finished successfully.
Functional departments LOATH project office and all those who make them do project work. That includes us, 5 youngsters (10 yrs younger than average age), who have responsibilities of making them do things, but hold no organisational power what so ever. Lower on subordination chart than us are probably genitors only. Hereby I send my warm regards to the matrix organisation and indirect subordination. At times the pervasive hatred results in name calling at meetings or screaming during telephone calls.
Uncertainty is over the top, often tasks are undoable because of lack of understanding at some level of subordination chart which causes constant rework and doing things for the sake of a status update, compromising quality.
In fact the latter was our mantra for the first 3 months of work. "We are making toilet paper" - was the common answer to the question of what we are busy with. There were variations : spinning hard (in the sense that we are doing all we can to divert the task to anyone else, not to do it ourselves), loading more garbage(process models) to the garbage storage (database) and others. This year started even worse, 2 members of our team spent days playing computer games at working place, instead of doing anything at all. A sign of complete distrust.
Being in complete vacuum, no one feels any incentive to drive the project to any outcome, the ending is not even imaginable, the land is far beyond the horizon, we are surrounded with heavy, homogenous clouds of uncertainty, chaos is everywhere, people are losing their minds, lots are actually leaving the firm.
In this situation there are very timid attempts of a PM to solidify the ground to avoid sinking in this swamp by asking us to maintain the monitoring table tidy and updated, minute the meetings we attend and submit weekly plans. As I presume, because of lack of belief in the
project, none of those things are being done voluntarily unless PM or anyone else reminds about them specifically.
Default disrespect is another feature of our sick organisation. Pointing fingers, denial of ineffectiveness in oneself, cooler conversations about uselessness of all efforts, phrases like "it can't be done with those idiots" or "I won't do the work for those losers" at times occur. At the same time, it seems like, EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS, that ineffectiveness is ubiquitous and unarguable, but any attempt to change it is futile. Catch 22, noir.
Only castles in the sky.
The meeting with HR was planned on new year's eve.
It has been already about a week since laziness spread all over 3 levels of our office. 2 days earlier, a new employee has been hired, Nadine, who was to "support the implementation of the One Company Project". She was responsible for making the TO BE model, or, in other words, making processes that we modelled more effective.
As was expected, she was outraged with the "toilet paper" that we produced, the process models didn't make any sense, the process maps didn't match the text description in the same documents, all thanks to the conflicting requirements that we managed to satisfy by completely disregarding common sense.
Nadine has found HR documents to be a complete nonsense, noted some of the major mistakes, compiled a presentation and arranged a meeting between HR and project office represented by our head, aka, PM, herself and us, the 5 brave youngsters who were to sit there silently but alarmingly and OBSERVE how HR would outburst with yells of resistance. In fact as I now understand they just reacted as those being under continuous torture of unclear demands for the previous 4 months.
The meeting was in fact a disappointment. Nadine was being silently torched by about a dozen of pairs of female eyes which belonged to members of HR function for about 90 minutes non-stop. The air was thick as mature cheddar cheese. She tried to communicate to the unfriendly audience but failed completely, because no one was in the mood to listen and clearly was not going to do anything she had to tell.
…and then Santa came into the room. It was new year's eve, someone arranged the surprise, Santa HAD to congratulate everyone in the office, he didn't care we had a battle going on there, he was doing his job. He entered the room and started speaking loudly, everyone looked aside nervously, thinking how to end this nonsense with the best outcome for oneself, winning the game.
The surroundings now looked very much like a circus. The image was complete, everyone in that room was a pretender, making an appearance of working on the project, as if trying to achieve something real, but in fact just trying to convince the audience (project management/ Italian headquarters, whichever) that he/she is busy at work, while in fact playing games and waiting from the project to pass by with minimal impact to one's work.
The meeting ended with the result drastically different from what Nadine expected, she didn't manage to make HR remake their process descriptions, a compromise was found.
What's next or who can solve THIS case?
Next meeting with one of HR managers ended with open swearing and hysterics and one of the participant running out of the door screaming.
In my tet-a-tet conversation, Nadine admitted that this project does not seem to be in the interest of anyone involved, those whose processes are being optimised resist the change from below and the Italian headquarters from above seem to sabotage the process by making controversial demands and dragging the project processes by just not doing their own job right. She is completely lost in regards to where to find support and those stakeholders who are actually positive about this change. She has no means of overcoming the resistance, just because there is nothing else but resistance.
Nadine believes, higher management, who logically must be pro change, does not need the project to be implemented successfully because just initiating it and stating that it's underway is already good enough for all intents and purposes which is to demonstrate to the investors that the firm is becoming more effective, after all, there is such grand effort, such gigantic program! It can't be any other way! Economically, Nadine states, the company does not need this project, because in energy, earnings are over the top as always. How come this project came to existence then? Maybe because someone high above wanted to DEMONSTRATE that he's responsible for something substantial? Wanted to make the image. Circus, remember?
We have later found out that EBPM and One company in combination is the sixth attempt of the firm to optimise its processes over the last 8 years. Previous attempts are claimed to have ended with failure at the integration part.
So what? or taking lessons.
Leaving through the experience of working every day in such environment, I am having a constant déjà vu. I HAVE HEARD AND READ ABOUT THIS ALREADY. I have been prepared not to panic, I see the symptoms, I know the organisation is sick, the culture inside is degrading, but it's still possible to improve all that and flip the change curve upwards if appropriate actions are taken. It needs long hours of discussion, expertise and realistic judgement but at the moment I don't see any inclination of management towards strategic thought or at least an attempt to plan the change integration stage properly.
Nevertheless I am watching at this with interest as if a business case being played out in a giant multinational theatre. And I am extremely excited to see how all this will develop in the future and whether management will be able to steer the project away from the bitter end. This will be a wonderful opportunity to take lessons for everyone involved.
I suppose the main lesson obvious so far is that they actually give you quality preparation at Warwick. Starting from the entry interview with HR, where I felt like a fish in the water doing team exercises to the busiest days at work I feel that I have been well prepared for all this. And in case I haven't any particular knowledge already, I know where to start looking or whom to ask, thanks to Ned and his amazing network of students.
So, once again, do take the most from your year, do try and use your PMAs as an opportunity to learn more than given during in-class modules and head for distinction! Good luck and next time you are going through job interviews, choose the company wisely.
The text is about the meeting between PMO and HR offices that has recently been organised in the firm I work for in Moscow. It could be a useful read for students as it describes the case of how projects could be managed in contemporary large organisations and what problems come up.
Before I describe the meeting itself, though, I'd like to dwell a little on the context, which is key to understanding what happened. I'd like to believe, though, that my approximation of the REAL WORLD is close to the worst case scenario and a reader has good chance of getting into a better environment.
About the firm
The firm is in generation and wholesale of electrical energy and is a big player on local market, most successful amongst its competitors. Due to the expected shrinking of the market in the coming years several optimisation projects have been started.
MMPE or planning and aligning several projects with the purpose of achieving business strategic goals
There are 3 projects running at the moment:
* EBPM (enterprise business process modelling) focused on formalisation and optimisation of the processes running in the company;
* One Company, aimed at unification of the core processes across all the international branches of the firm and
* Generation Staff Restructuring, you guessed it right, focused at firing as many people as possible from headquarters office working within the very core function of the firm -- generation (too many managers).
You can now try and exercise your mind by telling why the three projects described above might inhibit each other's chances for successful delivery. I'd be glad to read your thoughts on this.
Being flexible about the plan is essential.
Interesting thing about the last project -- generation staff restructuring -- the first interim deadline was in November and the project must have been started in spring last year. So instead they've started it IN OCTOBER (reasons unknown) and the deadline has not been moved. So instead of 5 months they had 1 month for the first stage of the project. Guess what has been compromised? Budget? Quality? I bet the latter, but really, have no idea, they just did it somehow. As mentioned in the title “Being flexible about the plan is essential.”
PPMC or project management expertise as absolute must in a contemporary organisation.
Despite the fact that we do have an entity called project office (which I am a part of) and the fact that we have a complicated set of projects running RIGHT NOW, project management methodology is very far from being commonly adopted, even worse, no one demonstrates any knowledge of structured PM or admits the fact that maybe it would be useful to read something on it. One of my co-workers has recently recommended me to read PMBOK as a standard for change management.
I have to be fair, though, I've heard words "communication plan", "project charter", "Gantt chart", "project schedule", "project budget" several times from my boss , the project manager, but none of it is being actually used, except for one tool, monitoring table, which lists all the works, responsibles (that's right, it's plural) and deadlines with current statuses.
One of our directors also told me, and I it was hard to keep myself from giggling, that PM expertise is essential and absolute must in our organisation. He then promised that PROPER PMO is to be developed in the near future.
It might have been a conscious decision to avoid the planning and monitoring routine and not to use the formal structure of project management for the current projects (which might happen when projects are very small and simple) but with the mess we are currently in, I doubt it is the case.
Change management or (not very) productive chaos
Short message to Dea Nichols:
Dear Dea, if only I knew! If only I knew how change management is an absolute key for the internal projects and that very soon after finishing your module I will wake up utterly confused in the jumble of one! Oh, God knows, I'd read more on how to get people on the change boat and take them far across the chaotic environment towards the bright envisioned future! Because right now that knowledge would have saves lots of nerves!
End of message.
The Firm now seem to be in complete mess, Project Sponsors (somewhere high up in central office in Italy) are nowhere to be found. By Project sponsors I hereby mean those peculiar characters who initiated the project and who are primarily interested in its success, or, in short, those, who actually need it. I will come back to it, but it now seems like across all levels of the corporation, there is no one entity, which performs the project-related tasks with enthusiasm, so it's hard to imagine anyone who actually needs this project to be finished successfully.
Functional departments LOATH project office and all those who make them do project work. That includes us, 5 youngsters (10 yrs younger than average age), who have responsibilities of making them do things, but hold no organisational power what so ever. Lower on subordination chart than us are probably genitors only. Hereby I send my warm regards to the matrix organisation and indirect subordination. At times the pervasive hatred results in name calling at meetings or screaming during telephone calls.
Uncertainty is over the top, often tasks are undoable because of lack of understanding at some level of subordination chart which causes constant rework and doing things for the sake of a status update, compromising quality.
In fact the latter was our mantra for the first 3 months of work. "We are making toilet paper" - was the common answer to the question of what we are busy with. There were variations : spinning hard (in the sense that we are doing all we can to divert the task to anyone else, not to do it ourselves), loading more garbage(process models) to the garbage storage (database) and others. This year started even worse, 2 members of our team spent days playing computer games at working place, instead of doing anything at all. A sign of complete distrust.
Being in complete vacuum, no one feels any incentive to drive the project to any outcome, the ending is not even imaginable, the land is far beyond the horizon, we are surrounded with heavy, homogenous clouds of uncertainty, chaos is everywhere, people are losing their minds, lots are actually leaving the firm.
In this situation there are very timid attempts of a PM to solidify the ground to avoid sinking in this swamp by asking us to maintain the monitoring table tidy and updated, minute the meetings we attend and submit weekly plans. As I presume, because of lack of belief in the
project, none of those things are being done voluntarily unless PM or anyone else reminds about them specifically.
Default disrespect is another feature of our sick organisation. Pointing fingers, denial of ineffectiveness in oneself, cooler conversations about uselessness of all efforts, phrases like "it can't be done with those idiots" or "I won't do the work for those losers" at times occur. At the same time, it seems like, EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS, that ineffectiveness is ubiquitous and unarguable, but any attempt to change it is futile. Catch 22, noir.
Only castles in the sky.
The meeting with HR was planned on new year's eve.
It has been already about a week since laziness spread all over 3 levels of our office. 2 days earlier, a new employee has been hired, Nadine, who was to "support the implementation of the One Company Project". She was responsible for making the TO BE model, or, in other words, making processes that we modelled more effective.
As was expected, she was outraged with the "toilet paper" that we produced, the process models didn't make any sense, the process maps didn't match the text description in the same documents, all thanks to the conflicting requirements that we managed to satisfy by completely disregarding common sense.
Nadine has found HR documents to be a complete nonsense, noted some of the major mistakes, compiled a presentation and arranged a meeting between HR and project office represented by our head, aka, PM, herself and us, the 5 brave youngsters who were to sit there silently but alarmingly and OBSERVE how HR would outburst with yells of resistance. In fact as I now understand they just reacted as those being under continuous torture of unclear demands for the previous 4 months.
The meeting was in fact a disappointment. Nadine was being silently torched by about a dozen of pairs of female eyes which belonged to members of HR function for about 90 minutes non-stop. The air was thick as mature cheddar cheese. She tried to communicate to the unfriendly audience but failed completely, because no one was in the mood to listen and clearly was not going to do anything she had to tell.
…and then Santa came into the room. It was new year's eve, someone arranged the surprise, Santa HAD to congratulate everyone in the office, he didn't care we had a battle going on there, he was doing his job. He entered the room and started speaking loudly, everyone looked aside nervously, thinking how to end this nonsense with the best outcome for oneself, winning the game.
The surroundings now looked very much like a circus. The image was complete, everyone in that room was a pretender, making an appearance of working on the project, as if trying to achieve something real, but in fact just trying to convince the audience (project management/ Italian headquarters, whichever) that he/she is busy at work, while in fact playing games and waiting from the project to pass by with minimal impact to one's work.
The meeting ended with the result drastically different from what Nadine expected, she didn't manage to make HR remake their process descriptions, a compromise was found.
What's next or who can solve THIS case?
Next meeting with one of HR managers ended with open swearing and hysterics and one of the participant running out of the door screaming.
In my tet-a-tet conversation, Nadine admitted that this project does not seem to be in the interest of anyone involved, those whose processes are being optimised resist the change from below and the Italian headquarters from above seem to sabotage the process by making controversial demands and dragging the project processes by just not doing their own job right. She is completely lost in regards to where to find support and those stakeholders who are actually positive about this change. She has no means of overcoming the resistance, just because there is nothing else but resistance.
Nadine believes, higher management, who logically must be pro change, does not need the project to be implemented successfully because just initiating it and stating that it's underway is already good enough for all intents and purposes which is to demonstrate to the investors that the firm is becoming more effective, after all, there is such grand effort, such gigantic program! It can't be any other way! Economically, Nadine states, the company does not need this project, because in energy, earnings are over the top as always. How come this project came to existence then? Maybe because someone high above wanted to DEMONSTRATE that he's responsible for something substantial? Wanted to make the image. Circus, remember?
We have later found out that EBPM and One company in combination is the sixth attempt of the firm to optimise its processes over the last 8 years. Previous attempts are claimed to have ended with failure at the integration part.
So what? or taking lessons.
Leaving through the experience of working every day in such environment, I am having a constant déjà vu. I HAVE HEARD AND READ ABOUT THIS ALREADY. I have been prepared not to panic, I see the symptoms, I know the organisation is sick, the culture inside is degrading, but it's still possible to improve all that and flip the change curve upwards if appropriate actions are taken. It needs long hours of discussion, expertise and realistic judgement but at the moment I don't see any inclination of management towards strategic thought or at least an attempt to plan the change integration stage properly.
Nevertheless I am watching at this with interest as if a business case being played out in a giant multinational theatre. And I am extremely excited to see how all this will develop in the future and whether management will be able to steer the project away from the bitter end. This will be a wonderful opportunity to take lessons for everyone involved.
I suppose the main lesson obvious so far is that they actually give you quality preparation at Warwick. Starting from the entry interview with HR, where I felt like a fish in the water doing team exercises to the busiest days at work I feel that I have been well prepared for all this. And in case I haven't any particular knowledge already, I know where to start looking or whom to ask, thanks to Ned and his amazing network of students.
So, once again, do take the most from your year, do try and use your PMAs as an opportunity to learn more than given during in-class modules and head for distinction! Good luck and next time you are going through job interviews, choose the company wisely.