Shifting PMOs to PMOBots

 

One morning my phone screeched. I got a message that three of my Project coordinators will be on holiday, one was visiting a different office in another city, and the other team member is already sick. This kind of information helps PMOs prepare the team's mental notes to ensure proper support networks are in place even when the PMs and PCs are on leave. Through one of our company's popular messaging systems, the message was delivered to me, "SLACK," and the message came from the Bot user available in Slack called "Holly." Holly was actually integrated with querying our HR systems, finding out if anyone from the team is on leave or not, and if Holly found anyone, it will send a consolidated update back to the team every morning.

The Bots

It was initially started with Holly (holiday-bot), but now if you guys search for it, you may not find it. It has been upgraded to Attendance Bot, and there are plenty of other bots available in Slack like time bot, Vacation Tracker, Reminder Bot, Calamari, and Leave Board. There could be actually more bots available than I just mentioned. I used these bots, so I have mentioned these. So now, coming back to our topic and coming back to "Holly." In Slack, all these bots have a name, profile, and picture just like all of us. We can interact with them through commands, to which they will respond promptly, and they can understand our basic requests. I have been using Holly as a valuable member of the team till I discovered all these bots, which I mentioned above. When I was aware of the only bot, "Holly," I always get to know what the resource strength looks like each day with its help. It actually works through a short piece of the code, which resides in one of our servers and connects our internal HR system and Slack. Our holiday bot "Holly" (which is now replaced with multiple other productive bots, but I still miss Holly) takes the repeatable mundane task and runs with it, which frees up valuable time for the other team members. It was not only Holly that I was using. I also remember one more bot called "GlossBot" because it maintains the glossary of standard terms in our organization and responds to our requests with definitions. E.g., if someone doesn't know what BOSCARD stands for, then a question is raised to GlossBot, and it immediately responds, telling that BOSCARD is an acronym for creating terms of reference – Background; Objective; Scope; Constraints; Assumptions; Risks; Dependencies.

The Change

A big thanks to the growing number of CRM systems with API interfaces and messaging systems like Slack, which positively embrace bots' use and automate more simple tasks. It can even further use to do the daily follow-up and tracking like letting us know if the team is in office or not; it can quickly inform the PMO manager about the milestone due and if the Project Managers have updated the risks log not. It can help the Project Managers or the coordinators in following up the assigned tasks are completed or not? Like bots can check with the task owners if the assigned tasks are completed or not, and it can even update the project plan accordingly.

Inadequate to automate & delegate to bots can waste time and reduce the quality.

Many PMO roles are taken up with a severe manual gathering and communicating information between various roles and stakeholders. These efforts are usually driven by the need to fill the information gap within a project and the organization. The entire process of gathering and disseminating information is always labor-intensive. As a result, a PMO analyst always ended up and stuck up in a furrow of working on low-level and repetitive tasks. Moreover, the gathered information relies heavily on human intervention, which can lead to error or bias. The entire process, which I just mentioned, is relatively slow and inaccurate, and it can leave Project teams and stakeholders feeling frustrated. It is the only reason why PMO has been viewed as a blocker, not an enabler. Ideally, the PMO should be an Enabler, and effective use of bots can help them become enablers by reducing the administrative overhead and delegating repetitive and mundane tasks to bots.

Use of bots and automation scripts to reduce the mundane or repetitive tasks

PMOs have almost all the processes, which clearly screams out for automation. Normally automating such tasks can be cost-prohibitive because of the temporary nature of the Project. The question here is Project may be temporary, but the project portfolio is not.  Usually, PMOs will have a ton of small and routine tasks easily delegated to bots, like checking the missing documents, ensuring metadata is up to date, and following up on the overdue reports. Many such tasks can be handed over to bots or can be delegated to an automated script.

Furthermore, there are plenty of common tasks and processes used by a wide range of projects in the Portfolio PMO, like booking meetings, tracking actions, creating a tracklist, and the list goes on. Every software project will have routine processes like creating GIT repos, running test scripts, and building test environments can also be handed over to bots or use workflow automation software to automate these mundane tasks. There are plenty of bots available in Slack that can take care of such mundane tasks, but that is just one option; we have multiple other options available. One can always create and customize the automation script and run them based on their requirement and feasibility.

RPA bots

Several RPA (Robotics Process Automation) solutions are available, like UiPath, Blue Prism, Epiplex, Laserfiche, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ElectroNeek Pega, which can create bots which can work either alongside human or independently. Bots that can be worked alongside humans are called attended bots, and the ones who can work independently are called unattended bots. Attended bots are helpful for repetitive tasks that require a high level of accuracy. Unattended bots can run 24x7 and can handle a large backlog of work from the queue of CRM, PPM, or any other subsequent tools. Unattended bots can help set up access for people working on projects, any reconciliation especially helpful for the finance team and PMO work like following up and checking the quality of the timesheet. Attended bots can able to save 30% of the time, and more saving can be achieved for more complicated processes, and unattended bots can be able to save almost all the time. In fact, it can remove the redundancy of all such mundane tasks.  

PMO should track automation as a KPI

Now is the time when PMO should start considering automation as a KPI, and having this in mind, PMO should start with new metrics and name them as "% automated processes." I believe that a PMO's role is to be the catalyst for the business, and if all of you have a similar thought process, then I recommend all of you should start targeting to grow these metrics month-on-month. Trust me, freeing up the valuable human hours to focus on making the business runs faster is the catalyst's primary responsibility. Being a PMO, it's always with us. It is either I grow, or we grow.

Learning continues

It is only the tip of the Iceberg. Learning about bots and RPA is like diving into the deepest ocean, and I can only go deeper until I hold my breath. So, I will try to cover the automation tools in the PMO in my next article. Till then, I would be happy to hear about this topic from all of you. So, please comment and help me to learn more 😊. 

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article are my own. I have articulated this article based on my experience of using apps like Slack, teams, workstream.ai; out of all, I find Slack very useful as it has plenty of bots starting from geekbot, which can be used for Scrum stand up. Other developer bots are available within slack like Jenkins CI, Hubot, Bitbucket Cloud, Gitlab, and many more such bots, which can ease up human hours by taking up the mundane tasks, which I mentioned in my article.