The PMO Programme

In common with many programmes, we use a Stage Gate process to control transition between the major phases of our programme. Stage gates are, in principle, very good things. They give the programme’s management, sponsors and stakeholders a chance to take stock of where we are and make an informed decision on whether to proceed with the programme as planned…. The trouble is that they rarely work like that, do they?

Here are some of the reasons we’re struggling with Stage Gates:

• There is no time built into our delivery plan to operate stage gates. If it was then the stage gates would sit fair and square on our programme’s critical path.
  (Let’s say we have four stage gates, each with a five day review/approval cycle. Each stage gate relies upon the delivery and approval of a defined set of deliverables and the achievement of a well defined set of criteria. If we run the stage gate properly and wait for the deliverables/criteria before running the stage gate that’s twenty days to add to our schedule and the programme goes live a full calendar month late. That’s never going to fly, is it?)
• A direct result of the above is that the critical activities that really inform the stage gate all run up to the wire as far as the stage gate process is concerned. If the stage gate is due this Friday, you can guarantee that the techies will have planned to work way into Friday night (or, if they’re up against it, across the weekend) to have the environments set up for our next stage start on Monday morning.
• We have attached “Go/No-Go” decisions to our stage gates. This prompts the question – what happens if the decision is “No-Go”? Do we all pack up our laptops, iPads, flipcharts and stress balls and go home? No-one seems to know.
• Last, and by no means least, there is an assumption that each stage gate will be passed. As we’re not using a waterfall delivery method many of our project teams have already moved into the next stage, assuming that they are doing so at little or no risk.

So where does that leave us? With a process that really doesn’t seem to work, but is one of the few major controls that our stakeholders cling to. Without Stage Gates, our senior managers would feel like they’re driving a juggernaut down a steep hill with no brakes, so we have to do something to make them work more efficiently.

Because this is a technology-enabled business change programme we have, to date, pinned Stage Gates to the design/develop/test/implement stages of our technical delivery. We’ve done this because these are easily identifiable stages and (surprise, surprise) the technology is defining our programme plan’s critical path so it seems sensible to make these the ‘go/no-go’ points in our programme. But it’s this very decision that’s causing the Stage Gate process to creak at the seams.

There are a couple of things I think we can do to try to improve this situation:

• First, let’s Stage Gate the business change phases of the programme rather than the technology stages. This will allow us to re-focus attention on our core delivery and, because these are ‘softer’ stages, we can run a more thorough and all-encompassing Stage Gates without holding the whole programme up.
• Second, let’s face the fact that there are no ‘no-go’ decisions, but there are likely to be ‘carry on with an adjusted scope/timescale/budget/organisation/risk-profile’ decisions., and we should be doing everything we can to make these decisions as well informed as possible.

Taking these steps will, I think, improve how we execute and use our Stage Gates and provide better value from the PMO to our stakeholders. Whether it makes the process any more palatable to the programme team is another matter entirely…