Non-financial information is informing the decisions of consumers, local communities and civil society organizations that are all expecting greater transparency from business. Once only a voluntary activity, there is a trend towards mandatory non-financial reporting. The COP serves as a good starting point, and in some cases meets government requirements.
SDG Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss. SDG Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. SDG Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
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Recent Videos View all videos. Journalism Breakthroughs. The ability to provide regular updates from roadmap owners allows for a means by which senior executives can readily understand progress and any emerging problems.
This not only ensures that the initiative is built around the right actions and measures—that is, that the organization is doing the right things—but also that it can support senior executives in being effective in their leadership roles during the implementation effort.
As Forrester Consulting found, this kind of focus is critical. Successful PMOs define metrics that are directly linked to strategic objectives and use them consistently throughout the organization. In this way, PMOs can develop a handful of key measures that give a complete picture of initiative status, and they can compare performance over time, bringing "new levels of transparency to their executive management. To ensure that roadmaps are sufficiently detailed and robust, many high-performing PMOs apply some form of a "rigor test" before an initiative can be launched.
A rigor test should be designed to determine whether the roadmap underpinning an initiative is sufficiently clear and whether it provides links to overall impact.
Furthermore, the test should identify whether the set of milestones and objectives in the roadmap provides a robust basis for testing for known risks and interdependencies. See Exhibit 3. It also facilitates consistency of quality across projects and programs within a portfolio. A rigor test discussion ensures that the roadmap contains the necessary and right information for senior leaders to be able to make course corrections when needed.
Rigor tests should be used by the PMO acting as a "steward of value" for the C-suite. There is a sizable body of evidence showing the financial benefits of this approach.
In an analysis by BCG, initiatives tested using this approach that earned merely a "pass" score still managed to capture percent of targeted economic value, on average, whereas those that received an "excellent" score captured percent on average.
Implemented correctly, this rigorous approach to establishing milestones and objectives helps establish a virtuous cycle. Information delivered at the right level of operational detail—and in nontechnical jargon—leads to greater understanding among senior executives. Understanding, in turn, leads to greater support and more effective course corrections that mitigate problems, leading to improved interim results and greater buy-in by all participants and, thus, enabling greater execution success overall.
The next imperative outlines how this works in practice. Institute Smart and Simple Processes When the right metrics and milestones are in place, it's time to establish a manageable routine to record and gauge progress in a meaningful way as the initiatives get rolled out. The risk that the company may be collecting and monitoring too much information is all too real and can put an undue burden on the staff executing the initiatives. For example, once large strategic initiatives are underway there is a tendency in some organizations to capture as much data as possible about the project.
Given the uncertainty inherent in major change efforts, this tendency is understandable. It can be reassuring simply to log everything—reducing the odds that the organization will miss some critical metric. However, beyond a certain point, the sheer amount of information—and the processes required to record it, as well as the requisite follow-up and clarification—becomes a new problem.
At its worst, this exacerbates the damagingly negative preconception of PMO staff as "box-checkers," more focused on processes than progress. The evidence proving the ineffectiveness of such an approach is clear. High-performing PMOs are far less likely to be primarily focused on policing and setting up policy than on supporting the actual implementation of the project or program.
Low-performing PMOs are more likely to mandate strict adoption and use of specific methodologies, templates, and forms—even in cases not well suited for the particular circumstances of the strategic initiative. Instead, PMOs must tailor their approaches to the needs of the organization. Strategically aligned PMOs eliminate onerous routines, unnecessary meetings, and excessively long reports. Rather, they apply the level of orchestration that is required to both support the business in strategy execution and help ensure progress and spot emerging problems without creating new bureaucracy or weakening ownership of the initiatives.
With the initiative roadmaps having been rigor-tested, the PMO well positioned, its role clearly understood, and the right processes established for gauging progress against upcoming milestones and objectives, strategically aligned PMOs provide the means for the business managers tasked with delivery to provide senior executives the information they need—and only that information—with enough time to make course corrections and ensure that the initiative gets delivered in terms of both impact and timing.
Another critical aspect of tracking progress is the importance of providing a current portfolio view for senior leaders.
Of course, not every individual roadmap for every initiative can be expected to be fully delivered. Analysis at the individual roadmap level shows that 35 percent of impact-bearing milestones exceeded plan, 45 percent were within plan, and 20 percent fell short.
Overall, this portfolio of initiatives was successfully delivered, achieving more than percent of the targeted economic value. A portfolio view—with a PMO actively supporting senior-leadership discussion—ensures that organizations adopt an enterprise-wide perspective. This generates the necessary forward-looking clarity on how the overall program is proceeding against planned impacts, spotlighting areas that require additional attention and enabling organizations to overdeliver against targets despite inevitable and initially unforeseen implementation shortfalls in individual roadmaps.
A crucial element here is "minimum sufficiency"—the right level of systems controls, information-based assessment of progress, and support by the PMO. And nothing more. For example, exception-based reporting on a monthly basis is a far more efficient way to monitor progress and engage with senior leaders than weekly meetings held to talk through results that are in line with expectations.
The idea of minimum sufficiency pervades the behaviors and processes found in successful strategy-execution programs; it eliminates excess interaction, organization, data collection, and communication, boiling down potentially overwhelming amounts of information on an initiative to only the most critical milestones, risks, interdependencies, and objectives. With that distilled information, senior leaders can best consider decisions and actions that will have the largest and quickest impacts.
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