PMO Training Wheels - Global Team Gathering Edition

Achieving the right balance when building a new PMO is more art than science. How many FTE? More consultants? New Vendors? Full outsource? Just when you think that, you have your charter and you understand your hiring goals you realize the real fun is just about to begin.

If you have modest reporting needs, conversion goals for growing your organization, or just a list on paper of potential agencies to contact, I will cover those challenges in a different post... today I have some spokes for your training wheels where the landscape is big, complicated, and well charged.

I had the opportunity to construct global standards for contractor procurement, time tracking, and asset retention while working at a global pharmaceutical company that taught me some valuable lessons:

How can a hiring manager in England retain a consultant in Michigan? When the site management's interpretation of newly minted laws meant that, no interviews could be allowed? For our British colleagues the concept that meeting a consultant face to face was too close to the full time hiring policy to be allowed was jaw dropping. For our finance colleagues transversing the legal and system hurdles so the money flowed in the right manner with the right taxes paid was just as challenging. Facilitating both with honest SLAs that talk candidly about workload can be a challenge. Finance associates need to understand that hand writing a transfer to the ledger every month may become 200 transactions without much warning. Often overlooked inline help can become critical when you start looking at users that are in not only other business units with different agendas... but new cultures.

Being really ‘crisp' about the names of rolls and roll descriptions before making your PMO national ... let alone global... is the Special Assistant in Boise, Idaho the same as the Billing Manager in Atlanta, Georgia... the Software Engineer III in France may actually be a Software Tester IV in Italy... or even a Senior Design Lead in San Francisco, California. You may track all of your ‘time' through your work breakdown structure (wbs) but you will have a much easier time making budget cases and process flows meaningful across the organization if your get the job titles and skill sets settled up front.

Global reporting of contractor dollars and workload and skill set sound great... until uncover some very ugly situations as start to ask agencies for the names of all their consultants, the hiring manager, and rates in preparation for getting the right electronic timecards to the right people and the right purchase order dollars in place:

• Contractor submitted was converted to an FTE 6 months prior... agency still billing weekly for same... sending to central processing... getting paid... agency has 85 other contractors on site... many on critical projects... legal and procurement want to ban the agency... business stakeholders terrified of brain drain / time loss.
• Contractor submitted not claimed by any hiring manager at the site... unclaimed list goes to business managers globally... actually does work for another department and IT pays for it ‘as a favor.'
• Entire portfolio of contractors work on 6 - 10 project codes that change monthly and are spread over 15 purchase orders that shift with the hardware fulfillment wind... need a server... charge the people elsewhere until the end of the quarter.
• Group of contractors compensated well over $300 / hr by niche agency owned by the spouse of a director in a sensitive business group. The skill set is not unique... the software is... well... special J.

As you work through how your vendor management model will evolve be honest as a governance team (procurement, legal, business, IT) about where you want to be more aggressive about ending bad practices.

If you have, 100 - 2000 or more consultants to manage and you are not looking for a high percentage of conversion to FTE than I highly recommend the ‘spot market' approach. Bring in a vendor neutral party to assist and reap the benefits of centralized management. I have worked with Volt's spin off known as ProcureStaff (http://www.procurestaff.com/) and have seen them grow tremendously over the last 7 years.

While the business process work is still your work... having a partner ‘own' the master contracts with each agency can make you a rock star to your legal partners... centralizing the invoicing and electronic processing with validated purchase orders, cost centers, and project codes will score you prime seating at the next procurement event... and once your hiring managers become comfortable with the screening staff and only have to review quality resumes you won't have to sneak into town with your next process improvement road show anymore!

What challenges are you facing in making your resourcing plan a reality? What are your greatest ledger challenges? Are you ready to never give a recruiter a ‘suggested rate' again?

(Photos are the work of Strollerdos, Leo Reynolds, and Roland and are used under Creative Commons License)