Kevin Kinnally -April 2008
Improving Consulting Results with a Program Management Office
In 2003 Oracle Consulting's North America leadership realized they had a problem with the delivery and execution of some of their projects. Although the issue was not widespread, it was clearly effecting client satisfaction. During a month-long analysis effort several large projects were reviewed, a number of clients interviewed, and brainstorming sessions held with many consultants. This process uncovered three deficiencies we thought were critical to our clients' ongoing success:
- A lack of rigor in the process of project management
- Absence of a formal means to assess, develop and measure the capability of its project management practitioners.
- A lack of best practices and governance to ensure the use of more rigorous processes and new practices
The Solution
We decided to mobilize a small team of senior program and project managers—called the North America Project Management Office (NAPMO)—to address the shortcomings found in the analysis. Starting with the premise that client satisfaction would improve only if Oracle Consulting addressed its overall project management competency, the team set out on a mission to grow project management and process maturity across NA Consulting.
One advantage the NAPMO had as a part of Oracle Corporation was a robust Project Management System from the Oracle Projects family of products. This framework provided the team with functionality to manage project funding, resource allocation, expenditure, revenue and costing—and a single source of project truth for project data. This framework enabled the team to readily report on and analyze various aspects of projects performance. This was invaluable in allowing them to jumpstart their efforts.
From there, NAPMO created initiatives to focus on the key areas related to the people we employ and the process we use.
Read More:
NAPMO People Initiatives
NAPMO Process Initiatives
Project Management Office – The Benefits
Results in our People
The NAPMO has seen a tremendous interest from the field consultants for a career in project management due to these initiatives and programs and a high level of excitement to participate in the training and certification programs was generated. In the last 3 years the NAPMO has certified 320 people at certification levels 3-6 and are now certifying people at level 2 as well. Of our 320 Oracle level 3-6 certified PMs, 220 are certified PMPs, Project Management Professional accreditation from the Project Management Institute. When the NAPMO started four years ago, Oracle had fewer than 5 PMPs in our consulting business.
Today, this group has provided over 4000 days of classroom training in the last two years and the training classes continue to sell out before the quarterly schedule is published.
The increased use of tools and visits to the NAPMO web site also indicate rapid growth in the interest for project management excellence. The language the PMs use in discussing project status, and project events, has evolved to the point where schedule variance, estimate at completion, estimate to completion, and others key project management delivery terms are routinely mentioned and universally understood in our business.
Results in our Projects
The NAPMO developed the mantra of "Target, Track and Measure" to drive home the message that projects must have measurable goals that can be tracked over the life of the project and can help quantify success. It was only with this approach that the NAPMO felt it could substantially change the culture and dramatically improve project management performance. With targeted results for each project and for each business unit's portfolio of projects in a number of project key indicators such as margin return, on-schedule delivery, project review ratings and client satisfaction. These project and project management scorecards are then included in the overall business unit scorecard that is reviewed with senior management quarterly.
In a 2006 internal survey of existing Oracle Consulting clients, Oracle’s project management results were the highest of any given to Oracle Consulting with an overall rating of 6.7 on a scale of 1 – 10 (highest level of satisfaction). Clearly there is room to improve, but this is an encouraging sign.
In a 2006 analysis report, results were also positive, indicating that Oracle received the lowest citation of problems in: business benefits being realized or results not meeting client expectations and that “these findings are good validation of Oracle Consulting’s strong performance on goal attainment” of helping clients improve business process, or consolidate / replace IT systems.
The same report indicated that Oracle has the best record for managing problems related to project management, finishing either first or second in low frequency of problems such as insufficient project process, structure, resource management, scope management, post implementation planning.
Additionally, our annual project analysis revealed that Oracle Consulting has:
- Decreased non productive time by 43% over two years,
- Reduced financially troubled projects from 12% of the overall portfolio to 5% in four years,
- Reduced the final 'Red' rating on project reviews by 25% in two years while reviewing more complex projects over that same period (we have doubled the number of reviews on projects with budgets > US$3 million).
Conclusion: Next Steps
The NAPMO continues to aggressively improve its programs by enhancing the training curriculum, driving credentialing to entry level project managers, providing even greater levels of detail on the root cause analysis and driving those results into the overall training and communication programs. Building off this success, the NAPMO is evaluating other ways to help clients with their project management responsibilities by offering services that will help clients build a project management office capability for a specific engagement where Oracle Consulting is not engaged already, or helping clients build an organizational PMO similar to the NAPMO model to build their own core competency in project management. As part of the NAPMO, we are excited by the progress and feel there are continued opportunities to improve our project delivery further manage project risk and uncertainty for our clients and help them achieve their desired business results.
Mr. Kevin Kinnally is the Group Vice President of Oracle's North America Project Management Office. In this role, Mr. Kinnally is responsible for enhancing Oracle Consulting's capabilities in Project and Program Management, via standards, certification and training programs, and a Quality Assurance program that provides independent project reviews of its key projects.
