From Whose Perspective?

I frequently hear from PMO managers, “Yes, we get it; we are already simplifying.” Yet when we look closer through the lens of simplicity, we find that they are indeed simplifying, but from their own perspective, and not necessarily from their customer's, or stakeholder's standpoint. As Bill Jensen points out, “Throughout all history (including in all workplaces), those in power have always defined and leveraged simplicity as simpler for them, and those with less or no power have always struggled with top‐down, mandated approaches that make things more complex for them.” PMOs rollout processes make it easy for them to report to management, but often make it cumbersome for project managers. It is a good idea to work backward from the needs of those doing the work as you simplify. There is only one judge of simplicity: your customers and end users. You need to put yourself in their shoes and evaluate the total experience from their viewpoint. Engage them to become part of the simplification and suggest ideas and reward them for participating.

Minimalism—Less Is More

Traditional approaches rely on the principle that to control better and establish sound governance you need heavy methods, processes, and tools built on intricate rules. Simplicity is based on the opposite principle of minimalism, and less is more—seeking out the essential and separating the value‐adding activities from the non‐value‐added minutia that sucks up time and energy. As Hans Hoffman, a legendary artist, remarked, “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” The PMO needs to be in a relentless pursuit of less but better.

Scalable

Methodology and governance structures should be scalable and adaptive based on criteria like project size, scope, complexity, and business impact. One of the common complaints from project managers is that it takes them more time to complete the project documentation than the project itself. Even though it was a simple project, they had to apply all the steps to comply with the PMO methodology. To strive for global consistency and standards, a one‐size‐fits‐all mentality sounds good but is not practical. Projects and programs by definition are unique with different characteristics requiring diverse approaches. Scalable processes and methods can be designed to address the unique aspects of projects. A simple project may need very limited process steps versus a complex project that may require more elaborate methodology steps.

Self‐Eliminating

Good processes should have a built‐in mechanism for changing or eliminating the process. We can all identify processes in our organizations that have survived way beyond their desired purpose. There are processes that are in practice and institutionalized simply because they have been done for a long time and nobody has questioned them. Good processes should have a built‐in mechanism for changing or eliminating the process. Part of the PMO governance should be a method to conduct periodic process reviews and decide when a process or practice is no longer useful or when it needs to be updated to make it useful again.

Desire Lines

Have you ever taken a shorter unpaved route while walking to get to someplace? Think about why you desired the informal way rather than the paved path. It could be for a number of reasons; it probably seemed shorter, more efficient, or you simply preferred it due to the better scenery along the way. Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route. Similarly, PMOs need to sense and observe the existing desire paths of methods and processes and adapt and reinvent PMO processes along end‐user, customer, and stakeholder desire lines.

Simple Rules

It is a common misconception to think that in a complex project environment with DANCE characteristics you need more top‐down processes and intricate rules. Examples from the application of complexity science illuminate the opposite. In highly complex situations and uncertain and unpredictable emergent environments like nature and living organisms, simple rules are the underlying code that can handle and resolve enormous complexity. For example, I am sure at some time you have looked at the sky and wondered how some birds could fly in a V‐formation without crashing into each other. This is a common example used in complexity science to illustrate the power of simple rules in nature. The birds fly based on following three simple rules: separation—maintain distance/avoid crowding neighbors (short‐range repulsion); alignment—fly in the direction of the bird in front of you/steer toward average heading of neighbors; cohesion—steer toward average position of neighbors (long‐range attraction).

The idea of simple rules based on complexity science has been applied to business for some time now. Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt, in their book, Simple Rules: How to Survive in a Complex World, explain:

Simple rules are shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information. Simple rules work, it turns out, because they do three things very well. First, they confer the flexibility to pursue new opportunities while maintaining some consistency. Second, they can produce better decisions. When information is limited and time is short, simple rules make it fast and easy for people, organizations, and governments to make sound choices. They can even outperform complicated decision‐making approaches in some situations. Finally, simple rules allow the members of a community to synchronize their activities with one another on the fly. As a result, communities can do things that would be impossible for their individual members to achieve on their own.

To be effective, simple rules have to be a handful, not too many and not too few. They have to be tailored to the organization using them. They have to be well defined for an activity or decision. And they have to provide clear guidance with the freedom to exercise judgment. The PMO can use the idea of simple rules to guide effective decision making for activities like project selection and prioritization, when to kill projects, risk assessment, stage‐gate reviews, and others.

In his book, Ten Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda, a simplicity evangelist, design guru, and former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, outlines the following 10 laws of simplicity that can be useful as you aim to simplify your PMO:

1. Reduce. The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
2. Organize. Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
3. Time. Savings in time feel like simplicity.
4. Learn. Knowledge and sensemaking makes everything clearer and simpler.
5. Differences. Simplicity and complexity need each other.
6. Context. What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
7. Emotion. More emotions are better than less.
8. Trust. In simplicity we trust.
9. Failure. Some things can never be made simple.
10. The One. Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Assess Your Annoyance Factor

To build your own Department of Simplicity, you have to start by looking in the mirror and asking key questions to assess your annoyance factor:

• How many PMO processes do we have? Are they too many?
• Are these processes cumbersome and annoying?
• How many of the templates/reports are more than one page long?
• How many of them have more than 10 steps?
• How many of them have more than three levels of approvals?
• How much time is spent by project managers/team members on documentation?
• How much time is spent on generating, disseminating, and reviewing reports?
• What would the PMO's customers and stakeholders love for us to eliminate or reduce?
• What would those who matter most love for the PMO to stop doing?
• What is it that the stakeholders struggle with if the PMO was killed and ceased to exist?
• Is the PMO making its stakeholder's job easier?

As you ask these questions, challenge the status quo bias—the tendency to continue doing something because we have always done it this way. For example, in a financial services company, a project review process was outdated and cumbersome. Upon questioning the PMO team, nobody could identify the origin or the reasons for the process—they were just following the process blindly because it was already in place and nobody ever questioned it.

As you review and assess your project environment or PMO, you can distinguish between value‐adding and non‐value‐adding activities based on the Japanese principles of Kaizen. Kaizen practitioners focus on muri, mura, and muda. Muri means overload, mura means inconsistency, and muda is waste. In the pursuit of implementing simplicity, overload, inconsistency, and waste are critical factors to review.

Bill Jensen also provides some tips to simplify on his simpler work blog that are particularly relevant to PMOs. Ask your user/audience/customer just one question—“How can we make this easier for you?”—and you will quickly learn what simplicity looks like.

Always start with time poverty and attention deficit disorder. Yes, there are bigger, more systemic, more entrenched problems that need simplification. But if you focus on saving people time and on capturing and using their attention wisely, you will never go wrong. These are among the top two challenges that will always benefit from simplification efforts.

Always give the user more control. The more control that the user/audience/customer has over using your product or service, the simpler it will be for them.

In our work with organizations around the world, we practice the following steps in our effort to simplify project management and PMOs:

• Inventory and review current processes and methods. Pick the top three processes and see how they could be streamlined, and find ways to eliminate redundancies and simplify them.
• Think about how you can cut, slim, trim, prune, combine, and modularize existing methods and processes.
• Conduct a reverse pilot, which is the opposite of a pilot. In a pilot, you test new initiatives; in a reverse pilot, you test whether removing an activity will have any negative consequences. For example, you can stop publishing a marginal report that takes a huge effort to produce. If nobody complains after you stop it, that means the report was unnecessary.
• While implementing methodologies, begin with an absolutely minimum set of processes. See how you can create the least annoying and least intrusive processes. Substitute practices that match more closely with your organization. Carefully add practices that address specific organizational or project situations.
• Ensure that your PMO's methodologies and tools are scalable—fewer steps for simple projects and more detailed steps for complex projects.
• A “one‐page‐fit” should be a rule of thumb for most PMO reporting and documentation requirements.
• Identify opportunities to streamline processes, reporting structures and approvals—see how you can reduce the layers for approvals and decision making.
• Follow this principle: don't add until you subtract. Reduce the weight of heavy methods by subtracting non‐value‐adding steps before introducing value‐adding processes.
• The simplified processes should be explained and communicated clearly.
• Engaging your stakeholders early on in the co‐creation of the processes or templates will increase their support and adoption of the process.

Table 11.1 is a sample grid that the PMO can create to list the process, proposed simplification, impact of the change, and who the simplification would impact as it embarks upon the Department of Simplicity initiative. You can list all the PMO processes that have been identified as complicated, cumbersome, or annoying as possible candidates for simplification.

Simplify Checklists

As we discussed in Chapter 9, part of project and PMO governance is to provide standardized checklists. Checklists can help drive the right behaviors by providing the right information at the right time. However, often checklists are too long and complicated and do not achieve the intended results. Atul Gawande in the Checklist Manifesto, suggests tips for simple and effective checklists: They cannot be lengthy. The rule of thumb is no more than five to nine items; They should be timely, contextual, and depend on the situation; Focus on “killer items,” steps most dangerous to skip and sometimes overlooked; The most difficult part of checklists is managing tension between brevity and effectiveness. Use simple, exact, and familiar words; Checklists ideally fit on one page, free of clutter and unnecessary colors; Test in the real world and simulate. Checklists should and can be modified to fit local procedures, processes, and language.

Create a Simplicity Advisory Board (SAB)

PMO can take a leadership role and establish a simplicity advisory board (SAB). Phillips Electronics has created a SAB made up of experts who help the company create simplified offerings such as instruction manuals that non‐tech‐savvy consumers can understand. It is evident from Phillips's success with recent innovative home lighting products like the Hue lighting system with its packaging, intuitive design, and “cool” factor. The PMO can engage a variety of stakeholders in the SAB to co‐create and garner valuable feedback and advice.