The Business Driven PMO Workshop Hits London

Terry Doerscher and Andy Jordan are long time PMO stalwarts. Together they have delivered numerous Business Driven PMO workshops across the States and now we’re happy to have them here in London on Friday 12th June. Both Terry and Andy are keynote speakers at the PMO Conference the day before so it made sense to make sure PMO practitioners in the UK get the opportunity to take part in what their US counterparts have been taking up for the last few years.

The Business Driven PMO workshop combines fresh new PMO thinking combined with interactive learning sessions delivered over one day.

Here’s an overview of the workshop and what participants can expect from their day:

As we know the dynamics of today’s operating environment means that the forces of change are inescapable. Whether it is the result of technological advances, the effects of globalisation, or ever-shorter product cycle times, organisations must be able to constantly assess, strategise, enact and capitalise on new opportunities if they are to survive.

Without question, an organisation’s ability to effectively manage change is now a mission-critical capability. Yet, many still struggle to align the different groups, activities, and approaches involved with managing change to function as a single cohesive entity. Worse yet, recent research shows that the problem is growing as the effects of specialisation and a distributed workforce drive even more organisational silos and lack of operational alignment.

In the workshop Terry focuses on the primary objective of any PMO – facilitate effective collaboration across the many different project stakeholder groups involved in managing the lifecycle of change. To achieve this, a PMO needs to create alignment on multiple levels, from effectively conveying organisational objectives, to establishing consistent operations and fostering commitment to shared values.

• Effectively develop the case for action for their organisation to improve its change management capabilities
• Communicate how portfolio management improves change-related decision-making and management
• Identify and prioritise change-related improvement opportunities using specific assessment tools
• Understand how key portfolio management best practices improve operations and reduce risk
• How to leverage the PMO to bridge organisational silos by extending portfolio management tools and techniques

This workshop explores practical methods and tools that can help your PMO develop and maintain a higher degree of strategic, functional and cultural alignment to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness.

Andy works with participants to provide practical tools that will allow their PMO to drive organisational value through portfolio execution. Andy looks at the different elements of portfolio execution from idea generation to benefits realization and helps workshop participants identify:

• How to prioritize and focus efforts to generate the best return
• How to align project execution with strategy to create the concept of ‘sub-portfolio management’
• How to facilitate enterprise wide accountability for portfolio execution benefits

In addition, Andy looks at how an emerging trend – strategic resource management can help an organisation deliver integrated execution – portfolio, operations, and support. Andy provides practical guidance for PMOs to facilitate the successful implementation of strategic resource management to improve portfolio execution and increase alignment in all organisational areas.

This workshop equips the delegates with practical skills and best practice approaches for immediate use outside the training room

Terry Doerscher draws on his experiences in PMO, portfolio management, change management and EPM. He was previously a Director at Planview for many years before branching out to consultancy and authoring. He’s currently a consultant at YourProjectOffice and is based in Austin, Texas. Terry also authored the excellent PMO book, “Taming Change with Portfolio Management” and he’s also still a PMO practitioner, delivering PMO services to clients in the States.

Andy Jordan is known to many as the PMO expert that regularly features in the popular projectmanagement.com website (formerly gantthead.com) and provides thought leadership at Projects@Work. Andy is also very much a PMO practitioner too, delivering to organisations in his native Canada through his own consultancy Roffensian. Andy has also recently released his first book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations.