The Teksouth Enterprise Consulting (TEC) Group

All work in IT and particularly in enterprise integration, derives from written, verbal or assumed requirements. Requirements represent the information nexus between consumer and producer, between management and developers, and between planning and execution. Begin building a lifecycle framework that integrates all of those interests and participants? PLM is a requirements-focused methodology and practice for facilitating enterprise solutions, designed specifically for use by PMOs.

Another way to think about PLM is as a total program visibility (TPV) mechanism. TPV represents the ability to instantly correlate and reconcile the many seemingly diverse program elements that exist across a complex enterprise. This usually occurs through visual tracking and automated reports, which illustrate the issues and relationships between requirements and other program elements. No matter how many systems or component/partner organizations are involved, if there is a centralized single-instance PLM framework, then the various processes and lifecycles associated with an enterprise can be holistically tracked and managed. The mere act of consolidating all of these processes and data centrally eliminates the single most critical problem facing PMOs today - the ability to both see the big picture and drill down to specific details in an automated fashion. Today’s PMOs are essentially integrated on the fly and are top heavy with manual processes.

PLM is the recognition that specialization is not the only or even the best answer for managing complexity. Often, an excessive focus on specializing specific areas of expertise merely add 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 those experts constantly change as the industry evolves.

The key to PLM is understanding that the PMO runs on information. That information must be easily accessible, transportable, translatable and available directly to the decision-makers without going through layers of expert interpretation first. This doesn’t mean that other people don’t add value to the information, there will always be a need for diverse skills in the PMO. However, it means that enterprise volume management system (EVMS) analyst is no longer the 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 matter how many specializations are created, the core processes are still all related within specific contexts. Those contexts provide a holistic view of what’s happening in the PMO and more importantly illustrate why it is happening.