|
|
|
|
Published on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 - 08:07 PM
|
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is the largest country of the Arabian Peninsula, and its stability, security, and tranquility is the responsibility of the Ministry of Interior (MOI), which is comprised of 30 main Sectors and Emirates. A sector is an MOI organization with responsibility for administering the National policies of the Kingdom in specific functional areas through its Branch Offices located in the Kingdom; and where complex functional responsibilities may be further sub-divided into Departments which provide National administration in a specific area of the Sector’s functional responsibilities, while an Emirate is an MOI organization which provides civil administration for a region of the Kingdom (Province). The number of these Emirates in the Kingdom is thirteen. The sectors and Emirates are shown in figure 5.
The National Information Center (NIC) provides services to sectors of the MOI, utilizing the most advanced and powerful computer systems in addition to a vast information network that covers all areas of the Kingdom.
The Ministry has a rich culture, taking pride in a lineage of leaders dating from 1344 H / 1925 Gregorian. From a management science perspective, a tradition of deference to one’s leaders has prevailed within the government, and this is no less true within the NIC. However, in keeping with its mission to serve the sectors, the NIC has evolved into a professional services organization which treats the sectors as its customers or as the beneficiaries of many of its Project Management processes. This has posed unique challenges to the PMO, especially in terms of the impact of the Project Management culture on the Project Management processes. Committed to excellence in the delivery of its projects, the NIC has worked with OPM Experts LLC to develop its knowledge of excellence in Organizational Project Management, to assess itself rigorously, to create accountability for improving Project Management, and to distinguish actions that mature the PMO in strategic directions.
The Ministry’s development started when the Prosecution was formed in 1344H to monitor the Al-Hijaz region administratively. The Prosecution was divided into two divisions:
- First Division: Ministry of Interior including Health, Education, Telegraph and Post, Legal Courts, General Police, Municipalities and Endowments
- Second Division: Deputies Councils consisting of Chairman and Deputies from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance and Al-Shura.
Responsibilities of those two divisions at that time were assigned to the Attorney General Prince Faisal Bin Abdulaziz (may Allah have mercy upon his soul). As the Ministry evolved, the Ministry became gradually responsible for the Local Administration represented by the Region Emirates and Security Sectors in all of the Kingdom's regions. Responsibilities were assigned to a series of qualified Ministers, and currently, Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud is the Minster, and the Deputy Minister of Interior is Prince Ahmad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud. Ministers of the MOI have delegated responsibilities vertically through the management hierarchies. Within the NIC, the PMO has oversight today of all NIC projects, providing computer and telecommunication systems, secured communication networks, public services and administration, and a full range of Information Technologies that are essential to daily life in the Kingdom.
In Saudi Arabia, large power distance and uncertainty avoidance are the predominant characteristics of the culture. It is expected and accepted that leaders separate themselves from the group and issue complete and specific directives. Historically, deference to the vertical line has been the rule within the NIC PMO. As such, the PMO Manager deferred to the Planning Manager, who deferred to the Director General, as depicted in the organization chart in figure 6 below.
In his wisdom, the Director General of the NIC Dr. Khalid Al-Tawil has sought to develop the capabilities of the PMO in keeping with the needs of the Kingdom. As such, NIC leaders have committed themselves to knowing excellence, assessing the organization rigorously, creating accountability, and distinguishing action for improving the PMO, the Project Management process, and the Project Management culture. This has involved maturing the PMO to face outward instead of inward, a cultural shift with significant implications for Project Management processes and the ways in which the PMO develops its capabilities.
Knowing Excellence
The standard of excellence in Organizational Project Management is the Project Management Institute’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3). The most widely adopted standard of excellence for managing individual projects is PMI’s “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge” or PMBOK Guide. OPM3 incorporates the PMBOK Guide and expands it into the domains of Program Management and Portfolio Management. The preferred method for implementing OPM3 is through assessors and consultants who are certified in an advanced toolset called OPM3 ProductSuite. The NIC hired John Schlichter of OPM Experts LLC, who led the development of OPM3 on PMI’s behalf and supported the creation of OPM3 ProductSuite, in order to evaluate the NIC’s OPM3 efforts to date. The purpose of the OPM3 assessment by OPM Experts LLC was to advance the PMO’s implementation in keeping with the Director’s commitment to develop the capabilities of the PMO to address the needs of the Kingdom.
Assessing Rigorously
The NIC undertook a series of OPM3 assessments. Each assessment involved the evaluation of process governance, policies, processes, training, compliance, metrics, control systems, as well as myriad elements of the Project Management culture. The first assessment had been contracted as a so-called “Desk” assessment. In a Desk assessment, the assessor sits “across the desk” from a representative of the organization, and takes that person’s assertions regarding the organization’s maturity at face value without validating those assertions. Having completed the first assessment, the NIC then engaged OPM Experts LLC to evaluate the first assessment and to perform a follow up assessment. Committed to assessing rigorously, the PMO directed OPM Experts LLC to expand the second assessment beyond the previous assessment, and to include process owners, practitioners, NIC leadership, and key vendors. As a result, OPM Experts LLC interviewed the NIC Assistant Director General, NIC Sponsors, NIC Planning Director, NIC PMO Director, NIC Program Managers, NIC Project Owners, NIC PMO Officers, vendor managers, Vendor PMO Manager, and Vendor Project Managers. A detailed organization chart describing the relationships between these roles is depicted in figure 7 below.
The first assessment had aligned to the cultural precedent within the MOI to focus on the needs of the leaders of one’s organization. During the initial Desk assessment, the assessor took at face value the assertion by the PMO Manager that effective Process Governance had been established as a body comprised of the right people who would meet on a regular basis to identify and decide improvements to the Project Management processes. The assessor took at face value the assertion by the PMO Manager that Project Management policies had been established, and also judged that the beneficiary or customer of all Project Management processes was the Planning Manager to whom the PMO Manager reported. In turn, OPM3 required the organization to collect metrics which ensure the Project Management processes perform in the manner required of the customers of those processes. The Desk assessment determined that all Project Management metrics did address the needs of the Planning Manager.
By contrast, the second assessment was rigorous, included more people than the desk assessment, and aligned to the strategic priority that the Director General and the Planning Manager placed on building the capability of the PMO to serve the sectors (facing outward instead of inward). The rigorous assessment determined that a Process Governing Body responsible for institutionalizing Project Management standards across the sectors would need to be comprised of more than the Planning Manager alone. Additional people would need to be included in Process Governance in order to standardize, measure, control, and continuously improve the Project Management processes in service to the sectors. The Process Governing body would need to include authorized representatives of the Director General, PMO, Planning function, Portfolio Management function, and Resource Managers at a minimum. Other functions would also need to be included from time to time, particularly during discussions of particular process changes, e.g. the Contracts Department in the case of the Contract Administration Process.
Additionally, we agreed in the rigorous assessment that those involved in the previous Desk assessment had viewed the decisions of the Planning Manager, captured informally, as the organization’s Project Management policies (as opposed to formal policy artifacts which could be shared with those expected to carry out the processes governed by those policies). Likewise the NIC PMO had assimilated a large number of metrics as part of its Project Management processes. In the more rigorous assessment, we agreed that we would need to ensure that the organization measures the right things and does not measure more things than necessary. For this reason the NIC PMO would need to develop policies that focused the NIC on the critical characteristics of each process, kept the processes lean, and ensured customer needs were met. It was agreed that in order to mature the PMO in service to the sectors, the customers of the Project Management processes are rightly the sectors (and not only the PMO Director). As such, the sectors would need to be engaged to incorporate performance requirements into the Project Management metrics collected by the PMO.
As a result of the contrasts between this more rigorous approach and the previous approach which was restricted to fewer interviews and which took assertions at face value, as shown in Figure 8, the second assessment revealed that the PMO had matured significantly even though the initial assessment had perforce inflated scores in certain areas, as dictated by the charter of the original assessment to be conducted as a Desk assessment and relying on the views of a proxy within the organization who was subject to the culture shaping his views.
Assessment One was characterized by a culture of Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance which was embodied in the many ways in which the Planning Manager was the focus of efforts to increase the maturity of the PMO (per figure 6), whereas Assessment Two aligned to the Director’s intentions for developing the PMO in keeping with the needs of the Kingdom by institutionalizing capabilities across the sectors (per figure 8). The rigorous assessment laid the foundation for developing the PMO to serve the sectors and to take the PMO in new strategic directions. While scores pertaining to the Project Management process were lower in the second assessment, scores were especially high in the areas of OPM3 pertaining to the culture, i.e. Organizational Enablers. These enablers corresponded to the Project Management culture, which scored nearly four times as high as the Project Management process elements described above.
As John Schlichter indicated previously and as I have described here, it was the culture that drove development of the Project Management process within the NIC. The conclusions of the first assessment demonstrated deference to the vertical management hierarchy, and were indicative of the wider culture within the NIC and within the MOI at large. In turn, the conclusions of the second assessment aligned to the Director’s vision of maturing the PMO to serve the sectors, and showed that those elements of OPM3 pertaining to culture offered the most leverage for increasing the capability of the Project Management within the organization.
Creating Accountability and Distinguishing Action
Just as knowing excellence enabled a rigorous assessment, the rigorous assessment in turn enabled the creation of accountability for improving the Project Management process and Project Management culture in keeping with the Director’s vision for the PMO. I was promoted from Planning Manager to a new position and given the mission to expand the capabilities of the organization into the domain of Portfolio Management and other strategic directions. My successor in the PMO picked up where we left off, and refocused the organization on key elements of standardizing and measuring the Project Management process while cultivating the Project Management culture, increasing the capability and scalability of processes within the sectors’ projects.
Conclusion
Through implementation of OPM3, the NIC is focusing on the integrated agenda of building process capability while orchestrating a transformation of the culture. OPM3 is a useful tool for clarifying what the Project Management culture is and enabling leaders to assess the organization from a variety of perspectives in the organization in actionable ways that predicate the creation of accountability for specific and measurable steps to build the organization’s project delivery capability. Within the NIC, OPM3 has been especially helpful for clarifying the impacts that processes have on culture and the impacts that culture has on processes.
The NIC has understood the reasons why many organizations fail to transform their Project Management cultures, and has avoided these pitfalls with our improvement initiatives. Working with OPM Experts LLC, our leaders have understood the need for knowing excellence, the need for assessing oneself rigorously, the need for creating accountability, and the need for distinguishing action. This straightforward approach has helped to advance the organization’s mission to ensure projects across the sectors are successful, promoting the stability, security, and tranquility of the Kingdom.
Editor’s note: The case study of the Saudi NIC demonstrates the impact of culture on process development. An additional case describing Harris Corporation demonstrates the other side of the virtuous cycle, i.e. the impact of process development on culture. To read the Harris case, see Mark Perry's book, “Business Driven PMO’s: Practical Insights, Techniques, and Case Examples for Ensuring Success” by Mark Perry (J. Ross Publishing). For more information about OPM3, join the free OPM3 SIG discussion group on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1312167.
Abdullah Tamimi is the Assistant Planning Manager at the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior’s National Information Center (NIC). The NIC entrusted him to setup and manage their Program Management Office (PMO), which consists of 80 complex IT projects, and 15 programs. He plays a pivotal role in envisioning and planning IT strategy as well as IT systems management processes & procedures at his organization. Establishing the Portfolio Management capability at the NIC is one of his recent achievements. He is involved with NIC’s main committees; for example: IT, Technical Direction, Planning and Projects, Training, and IT Portfolio Steering Committees. For four years, Abdullah was editor in chief for PMO’s monthly e-newsletter. In acknowledgement for his outstanding service he has been awarded special recognition certificates from the Minister of Interior and the Director General of the National Information Center. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Florida Institute of Technology, Florida, US.
|
|
|
|
Tip of the day:
Establish an environment where reporting bad news in a timely manner is encouraged rather than an environment where fear prevents the flow of critical information.
2009-10 allPM.com Editorial Calendar
Register for allPM
August Poll Question
Get Involved With allPM.COM
Submit your...
PM Glossary
Latest Forum Posts
|
