PMO and IV&V: Applying Best Practices Through the PMO to Drive Business Condition Improvement
Tuesday, February 15th 2011 @ 10:14 AM (not yet rated)
IV&V is defined as Independent Verification and Validation. This is a best practice employed by many businesses to help assure program and project commitment progress is progressing as expected or better.
In the PMO world, PMOs use different variations of the IV&V best practice to help the business condition make or beat plan for specific time periods such as fiscal year.
Understanding IV&V at the detail level when employing the method starts with understanding what is meant by verification and validation. Verification of a project or program is the assurance of the accuracy of a program/project based on written specifications and requirements. Thus validation becomes the final assessment of the findings from the verification. This is the traditional model.
Using PMOC methods, the IV&V processes are updated to include verification of additional items that contribute to a deeper perspective of overall risk of the on-going and developing life cycle for the assessed entity to the business condition improvement it was intended to enable.
New component processes to the IV&V process should consider the following items when assessing development tasks for their impact on program or project success. These include:
1. &nb sp; Schedule correctness statistically. Schedule is critical-pathed, with people or role levels assigned at every task
2. &nb sp; Program/Project alignment to a specific strategic objective that directly supports the sustainment or growth of the business condition.
3. &nb sp; Sense of urgency by program and/or project team members to meet or beat their work deadlines and their on-going demonstrative commitment to do so. Are they seeking acceleration opportunities?
4. &nb sp; Governance overview. Are the stakeholders and accountable resource managers managing their commitments in alignment with their program and project commitments?
Why the PMO?
One of the primary values of performing the IV&V on any entity is that the personnel who perform the IV&V work are independent of the specific work. This attribute suits the PMO extremely well, as most PMOs operate as a central operations office that keeps a watchful eye on planned work as compared to actual results so that a holistic assessment can be made ad-hoc about the state of the business condition resulting from the changing active state of the project and resource portfolio. We called this proper risk management.
What you should expect from the PMO IV&V services
The people involved with any program/project should always expect from the PMO personnel who are honest, have high integrity, are business smart, have appropriate technical competency, excellent analytical skills, have very developed skills in verbal and written communications and who are subject matter experts in PMO standards that are expected to be applied in any program/project entity. These folks must be able to present findings to any and all role levels as deemed necessary, when appropriate.
Personnel performing the IV&V for the PMO must have access to current state project and resource portfolio information as the portfolio application in place will (should) reflect the most current business condition risk state regarding program/project development progress. This is necessary as program/project life cycle progress is always changing along with competing priorities. This means that demand could be very high on specific resources to complete their assigned work sooner or later because of new work that was just authorized and to which they may have become assigned. As you may see, this could easily change the “sense of urgency” for any project. Most PMOs recognized their value is in how they manage the constant of change in the on-going business environment. To not do so, diminishes the value proposition of the PMO and the impact of IV&V.
Should every PMO have this as part of their value proposition?
If your PMO has delivery oversight responsibility for projects and/or resources, then the answer is YES! Remember though that this advisory is based on the following constructs:
- The PMO is or has as a directive a throughput optimization bent possibly blended with the cost containment model for proper best results. You can easily get by with only throughput optimization as saving time usually means saving money that improves future risk to the business condition.
- That the PMO is using a PPM application to centralize all project and resource information to load balance change and thus have oversight to existing and/or new delivery bottlenecks.
- That the PMO is committed to enabling best practices transparency of program/project progress to various governing bodies they serve in the enterprise.
