PLM Defined

Program Lifecycle Management is the recognition that specialization is not the only or even the best answer towards managing complexity. Often times, an excessive focus on specializing specific areas of expertise merely adds to the level of complexity and confusion that typical PMOs face every day. The truth is that many if not most of the people who support PMOs need to be generalists to fully grasp the breadth of topics that they are expected to deal with. It is very difficult to get work done if a parade of experts is required to fulfill everyday tasks and worse yet if that parade constantly changes as the nature of the industry expertise rapidly evolves.

The key to PLM is understanding that the PMO runs on information. That information must be easily accessible, transportable, translatable and must be available directly to the decision makers without going through layers of expert interpretation first. This doesn’t mean that other folks don’t add value to the information, there will always be a need for diverse skills in the PMO, however it means that EVM analyst is no longer primary interpreter of financial data and that the requirements analyst is not the only person who can produce requirements reports. The reality is that no how many specializations are created, the core processes are still all related within specific contexts. Those contexts then allow us to provide a holistic view of what’s happening in the PMO and more importantly illustrate why it is happening.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.