There seem to be a couple of immutable truths in the PMO world, especially in IT departments. First, there is always more work than can possibly be done. This usually surfaces in the form of an insatiable appetite for projects. Second, no matter how you prioritize the work, someone's going to be unhappy - and they'll try to make your life miserable by becoming the squeakiest wheel in the company.

The answer, as we PMO practitioners all know, is to elevate the prioritization decisions up to the company executives. This usually means some sort of cross-functional steering committee or other governing body. It's great theory, with one major flaw. Those execs don't readily participate. I can't count the number of poorly attended steering committee meetings I've run across. The execs either don't show or send a lower ranking delegate not empowered to make decisions. Which leaves the steering committee pretty powerless, and results in the CIO once again making the decisions. And once again taking the heat.

So, how do you get these all-too-busy executives to pay attention and take responsibility for prioritization? The best process I've found is what I call "shock therapy for the executive team", and it involves three steps: Presentation, Argument, and Decision Time.

Step 1: Present the problem. This is all about making the problem obvious. During one of my CIO stints, we were creating a new IT infrastructure from scratch. This, of course, involved many parallel projects that could not possibly all be run in parallel. So, I formed an project steering committee and invited all the VPs. All but a few sent delegates, and we made no decisions.

Fine. So I put together a picture of the entire architecture, detailed in big blocks the major pieces, there costs, effort, and timelines and presented this big picture to the corporate executive team at the monthly monthly meetings. I showed them the millions in costs, all the projects going live in the same month, and the amount of resources (double what we had on hand) required to get the job done. The CTO, who ran the product development group, took one look and said

 "Dave - if I were running this, there's no way I could do all of this at once. What are you going to do? How will you prioritize this?"

My response: "That's why I'm here".

Which lead immediately to Step 2: Argument.

First, the VP of professional services demanded that his CRM piece was critical and had to go live ASAP. To which the VP of Sales argued that if the SFA system wasn't put in place first, Sales would get stuck and Services would have nothing to do anyway! As you can imagine, each VP argued for there piece of the pie.

Which finally leads to Step 3: Decision Time.

I've written before about the use of various prioritization tools, such as scorecards, strategic alignment, etc. Here is where those tools finally come into play. They allow the executives, once they settle down, to look at some objective analysis to help them figure out which projects should come first. Whether that importance is based on fit to corporate strategy or critical operational needs, these tools are meant to be informative, not conclusive. You will also want to present any project interdependencies at this stage.

In the case above, the Exec Team quickly realized that some core processes were in dire need of automation, and that the ERP system was also the core of the architecture. Therefore, projects relating to ERP came first. The other VPs then understood why they had to wait. Even better, I was asked to present progress and new initiatives quarterly so we could decide as a body how to proceed. Note that in this case, we never even formed a Steering Committee. The Executive Team ended up taking responsibility directly!

I have seen this process work repeatedly, and the steps to "shock therapy" tend to follow the same pattern:

1 - Shock them with the enormity of the problem. And do it with graphics and simple numbers, not long lists of individual projects. If they get lost in the details here you'll be back at square one.

2 - Let them argue for a while. As they struggle with the problem they will realize this is way too important to delegate to their underlings, the CIO, or the PMO. They will realize these are truly strategic decisions - that's their job and they know it.

3 - Provide them with the information they need make these decisions. This information varies, of course, by company. So, you'll have to work with your Exec Team to figure what information is most effective.

And good luck - while this is easy to write about, it's no cake walk to execute. You'll be relying heavily on the relationships you've built with each executive (you have done that - right?) to see you through this process!