Complexity & PLM

As one might imagine, this is a difficult philosophical question. According to Hayenga (2008), there is a significant lexical difference between what is ‘complex’ and what is ‘complicated.’ He posits that complex systems are not merely those with many moving parts but rather complexity is inherent in systems and scenarios that are dynamic in nature or difficult to predict. This is a reasonable and pragmatic way of viewing the terminology and thus also tends to imply that systems which are highly dependent upon human interactions are necessarily more complex in nature. Humans, being the irrational creatures that we are, often interject a high level of subjectivity into the mix.

There is no better illustration of the dynamic interaction of many subjective individuals than a typical PMO. This of course becomes even more fascinating if their scope of interaction is elevated to the enterprise level. This becomes somewhat ironic when one considers that the PMOs have been created and chartered to correct perceived issues of system complexity which must be better managed. The reality is that much of what we consider to be “IT” problems are not technical in nature at all.

Recognizing a problem or a challenge is not enough. Many folks have hit the nail on the head in being able to identify the PMO or its associated management processes as the likely culprit of much of the related failures of IT projects / programs; however to date, no one has presented a comprehensive solution for this seemingly obvious problem area. There is recognition now though that such problems are solvable using new enterprise integration technology and techniques.

Complexity is implicit within each element of PLM (the other mini-PLMs or Ps). Over the years, the notion of “Portfolio Management” migrated over from the financial world to IT and has now become a new process discipline. As noted previously, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) popped up about ten years ago to address the obvious need to consolidate PMO processes. Product Lifecycle Management emerged over the last decade as an IT practice to address the very tactical aspects of design and innovation. Process management has been interpreted many ways – some schools of thought have advocated fairly sophisticated methodologies such as CMMi , others are adopting an “Agile” more flexible approach.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

What is an ePMO?

An Enterprise Program Management Office, or ePMO, is an entity charged with management of one or more programs and portfolio of systems or perhaps specifically with the integration of those systems. The ePMO concept or title began appearing in print about 5 years ago, but despite the amount of time that's passed since then, the practice of ePMOs haven't progresses much beyond the original PMO paradigms.

In other words, the ePMO has yet to be fully realized but for a few exceptions. The obvious question is why isn't this occurring more rapidly? Some might feel that the charter for an ePMO is beyond the scope of what most PMOs are charged to accomplished. It might be considered dangerous or out of scope to try to plan for ore manage relationships and interactions that occur around the PMO rather than within it.

The problem with this thinking though, is that nearly every IT focused PMO is now expected to integrate within the larger context of their enterprise. Even non-IT PMOs feel the pressure for increased oversight and accountability and all PMOs share one characteristic in common - complexity.

The complexity that must be managed in order to successfully execute a program is perhaps the single greatest challenge facing leadership today. The advantage with an ePMO that is designed to be an enterprise PMO from the ground up is that complexity is tackled directly, with mitigation built into a set of fused processes...



Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.