PM Network - February 2016

McIntyre says. “We’ve grown by acquisition, so there’s a lot of people here that still have that
startup, entrepreneurial feel. We have a challenge of trying to keep that energy, keep that
innovation alive while recognizing we’re actually a global company with a number of prod-
ucts—and it’s massively complicated.”
Given the organization’s size, the PMO team avoids a top-down approach and instead uses
incentives to find efficiencies. The company’s Kaizen program, run by the PMO, encourages
individuals across the company to find ways to streamline daily tasks. Kaizen is the Japanese
concept of continuous improvement, so the program rewards employees for identifying poten-
tial process improvements, which the PMO can implement across the organization to save
teams a few minutes each day.

“So many PMOs tend to focus on the big, high-profile projects, and that’s an important part
of the business. But the other side is the small incremental change,” Mr. McIntyre says. “That
leads to savings that makes the business more efficient.”
Ticketmaster’s human resources team, for instance, was inspired by
the Kaizen program to find ways to reduce the amount of time it spends
scrubbing payroll data each month. Team members cut the time from
one day to one hour—with an end goal of 30 minutes.

“We have a culture of continuous improvement, which I’m very
proud of,” Mr. McDonnell says, “because projects change. Demands that
the consumer and clients place on us change. So, there is never a best
practice. There is practice that can always be better.”
The PMO also has been able to slash the amount of time it takes to
develop features on one Ticketmaster product used in 12 markets. It
used to take up to a year to get a feature released across those markets.
Through planning, automation and batching pieces of the process, the
PMO has reduced that to as little as 10 days.