Our Associate Editor Amy Hatton talks to James Yeo (Head of PMO at Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s Directorate of IT) and Stuart Barker (Account Executive at Planview).
James and Stuart tell the story of how MCGA delivered a PMO Transformation. They brought a previously outsourced PMO back in house, rolled out a new PPM tool, and achieved full delivery in six months. This was after developing a roadmap for implementing a satellite PMO model as well as an enterprise PMO. This was accomplished in a very short time frame, and during the initial days of the 2020 pandemic lockdown. This created new and unexpected challenges.
Watch the podcast below to hear how James and his team achieved the transformation, which was supported by Planview’s technology. Amy also has a chat with James about stakeholder management, how sponsors want to be delivered, and lessons learned along the way. He also shares his top tips for a successful career in the PMO industry.
You can also find the complete transcript below.
Transcript:
Amy: Hello everyone! Welcome to the latest episode of PM Today podcast. Amy Hatton: I’m Amy Hatton and you all know me as the Associate Editor at PM Today. And today, I am delighted to be joined by two amazing guests. I know that our listeners enjoy hearing about the lives and challenges of flagship Project Managers, or PMO people, and then learning from their experiences. We’ll be doing exactly that today. James Yeo, Head of PMO at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s Directorate of IT, is my wonderful guest today. He is a professional PMO. He has over 15 years of experience in IT and business-related programmes and projects. He’s joined by Stuart Barker, the wonderful Planview executive who we work closely with at PM Today. Stuart is an Account Executive with Planview. He has walked the PMO transformation path with James, and he is very familiar with it. Hello, guys. James. James.
James: Amy, many thanks. It was nice to meet you.
Amy: Stuart, it was great to have you join us on the call. How are you?
Stuart: It was a pleasure to meet you, Amy. Thank you very much.
Amy: James and Stuart, thank you so much for joining me today. I think this transformation of the IT Directorate has been the most rapid I’ve ever seen, especially considering it’s a central government organization. If I understand correctly, you’ve managed to deliver something truly extraordinary in six months, despite the difficult couple of years we’ve had. It all comes down to the question of bringing back the PMO function that was previously outsourced and allowing you to manage it centrally within the agency. James, please give me the headlines about the programme.
James: That’s right Amy. In terms of the outsourced PMO it was in March 2020 when I first came in. It was a tight deadline, so it was only possible to transition the outsourced PMO back to house by September 2020. The main challenges I faced in that transformation were purely due to the absence, visibility, and control of the current PMO, ownership, and control of project information, processes, tools, methods, and the response time to get. That’s where the problems came from for the transformation. To have it brought back in-house to have that control back. I think the target date for dropping was very near. It was in terms both of understanding the current processes and tools and in terms how to engage external supplie.
