Start-Stop-Continue in the PMO

You’ve probably come across this simple, yet really effective exercise that you can be doing in your PMO to quickly gauge what you should be thinking about stopping doing in order to start something new while keep doing the things that people want and need. It’s a quick way to help you get started in your continuous improvement work that any great PMO regularly does.

It works well with the PMO team and it’s even more effective when you do it with your stakeholders – or customers of the PMO.

It’s easy to do, just grab some post-its and get people thinking about the three areas.

In this article, we share the outputs from one stop-start-continue exercise. It was completed at an event we presented at and the audience was a mix of project management practitioners.

Here’s what they loved about the PMO and wanted to see continue:

Then we looked at what they wanted to stop:

We shared this one over on Linkedin a few weeks back and the interest was brilliant – over 14,000 views and a bunch of comments from people who are really passionate and engaged about PMO [you can take a look at those here]

A great comment from Mike about the microwinging:

I have a (slightly guilty) feeling that microwhinging might well have come from me. It’s about people who focus on the little stuff, for example checking the punctuation, grammar and formatting without fully reviewing the content and the message first. Execs have very short spans of attention so I’m a firm believer in getting the little stuff as close to perfect as possible, so as not to distract them, but not before getting the report itself right. Neatly presented garbage is still garbage.

And then onto the start doing:

The insights and ideas that come from such a simple exercise are brilliant for a PMO and starts a discussion about the feasibility of stopping certain services and how to prioritise the new things that it could be doing. It’s also great for motivation and morale when you can clearly see what your customers love about you.

So in your next away day, community of practice event or just a quick team meet, will you try out start-stop-continue?

Carried one out? We’d love to hear about some of the insights you’ve found and can be shared with the PMO Learning community, [why not join us over on the PMO Learning Linkedin group?]