A recent study by Broadcom about the state of strategic portfolio management revealed the influence of digital transformations and AI on the role of the project management office (PMO). Further, it revealed common challenges in software development, such as budget constraints, skill shortages, and team coordination issues.
Broadcom’s Brian Nathanson, head of product management for Clarity, sat down with SD Times editor-in-chief David Rubinstein to discuss all this, as well as the results of the study itself. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
DR: So, what was the impetus for this study? Was it something you do every year?
BN: We don’t necessarily do the exact same study every year, but we do a similar type of study every year, just to find out industry trends, to confirm a few of the directional things that we’re seeing among customers, and to get an idea of whether the trends that we’re seeing are growing or whether they’re receding, and just to get a feel for how the market is playing out at the moment.
DR: Were there any surprises in the findings?
BN: Probably the most surprising thing was the strength of the response around the PMO growing in importance and the PMO expanding. These are trends that we have seen in the market. However, in the study, it indicates that 98% of the respondents said that the PMO is growing in importance, and 96% are intending to expand their PMO, which again, the strength of those numbers was surprising, because while we had seen that trend, it’s hard to find numbers that high in just about any study or survey. I think the other aspect of the study that we were pleasantly surprised by is the number of organizations that are looking beyond Agile. There was about 80% that said they’ve done enough with Agile, and they’re moving beyond it. And I think that those two things coincide, that the perceived importance of the PMO and of strategic portfolio management as related to that is tied to the thinking that we’re looking beyond Aagile now. We got our Agile teams. We’ve got everybody doing incremental work. Now let’s actually figure out what that work should be doing, right?
DR: It looks like some of the problem areas that are cited in this study could basically be found in every study of every area of software development that we deal with. People say they don’t have enough money, they don’t have the right skills, they can’t coordinate between teams. There’s too many silos. There’s too many dependencies. You know, these are issues that are industry wide, not anything specific to, you know, project management. So how are organizations trying to take these problems on, and how do they overcome them?
BN: I think there’s been a growing recognition of the fact that organizations need to expand the methodologies that they bring to bear when they’re trying to execute on this type of work. So while historically, people have defaulted to a project model, a lot of that is tied to accounting rules and such. So they try to do everything with projects. One of the challenges, especially when it comes to software development in particular, is getting organizations to see that they would benefit from seeing things more operationally, rather than as one-time projects. And so that’s part of the expansion that we call it, from projects to products. This kind of a product model, or a value stream model, is more of an operational model.
DR: Can you speak to the PMO role? What was it prior to digital transformations and AI, and where is it now?
BN: Sure, absolutely. So I think that prior to transformation and historically, the PMO has primarily been a governance role. It usually derived from the IT finance role. So the PMO was intended to provide controls over how the money was being spent. Right now, in some organizations, the more forward-thinking PMOs understand that if we wrap it in kind of a PR blanket of, “I’m not here to look over your shoulder. I’m here to help you,” then it is more easily accepted. But there were some that still just kind of looked things over. It’s like, okay, you need to make sure this gets classified correctly, because otherwise it’s not gonna get accounted for correctly. And so PMOs were seen as kind of the monster overhead.
What we’re seeing now is forward-thinking organizations that took the service role of looking to help. “Look, I’m here to help you. You want to get more done. I want to help you get more done. Let’s work that out.” And by making that type of a change, they found that the reaction they got was significantly different. It changed the overall perception of the PMO as somebody who could actually be a part of the solution, instead of being seen as this kind of gum in the works.
I’m kind of focusing on the negative aspects. There were some positive aspects in terms of visibility and transparency that the PMO typically gave efforts that were being monitored that other parts of the business are actually looking for. A lot of it also has to do just with technology merging with the business. It’s no longer quite the arms-length relationship it was even 10, 15, 20 years ago.
DR: In the survey, a big majority of the respondents said they are looking forward to the potential role of AI in project management, and what would that role be? What are they looking for AI to do that would free them up to be more efficient and productive?
BN: The most significant finding, as I recall from the study, was that people are hoping that AI will be able to take their historical data and give them better insight into how future efforts will perform. The benefit of what they’re trying to see is the predictive power of the data, and that AI can help them with the idea that, hey, if we knew someone could learn from our past stuff, we could make better estimates and predictions of what’s going to happen in the future. I think the challenge is just going to be, since AI relies on having a large quantity of good quality data available, the question is going to be how to make sure that you have enough of a quantity of the data for AI to really provide that type of insight.
DR: How does value stream management play into the PMO?
BN: There’s definitely a connection between the PMO and the evolution of the PMO and the expansion of strategic portfolio management and value stream management. The core, if you believe in core tenets of increased efficiency, visibility and agility, which are all things that you’re trying to get out of the operation or development value stream—those are the same types of things that the organizations that responded to the survey around SPM are looking for. I think that it’s coinciding in terms of how organizations perceive the concept of this operational model in addition to the project model. And I think value streams is one way that people have tried to look at that, and I think that it helps, because it changes people’s perception of what we’re here to accomplish. We’re here to accomplish a business goal. We’re not here to just be on time and on budget, even if it’s not the right thing that we’re delivering.
I think the expansion of strategic portfolio management is in service of the same pursuit, which is that we want to have technology organizations understand and align themselves with accomplishing the business goals, as opposed to having to tell them what to build, and then it’s up to us to make it work for the business goals. That’s usually what causes the disconnect, is that we tell them what to build, they build it, but the business goals have changed, and so what they’ve built is no longer as relevant as it would have been when we started. What we try to do is find the right balance of, okay, I’m going to commit to what I’m building. I want to make sure that that thing is in alignment with what you want as a customer, as a business.
DR: We hear all the time that organizations are having difficulty finding tech workers with the right skills for modern application development. Is that a problem in this space?
BN: The term that’s come out lately is talent management. And so I think that we’ll see a continued increase in interest in that aspect of the strategic portfolio management set, which is basically around resource capacity planning and workforce modeling. And so I think that one of the key things is that people believe that AI will help with that.
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