Why Aligning Value and Strategy is Important

Value is often in the eye of the beholder and because we attach ourselves to the perception of that value we can’t often differentiate between what we want and what we need.

As leaders, we often follow a similar approach when deciding what projects we should take on for the w\organization.  For instance, we may read about something interesting that another company is doing and think that we should be doing the same thing, this becomes your want.

Unfortunately what that other company is doing may not be what your organization either needs right now or worse is not even strategically aligned to its strategies.

All too often organizations have an annual planning cycle where individual leaders pitch their ideas for new projects and request funding.  And all too often these projects are disjointed, competing with other projects seeking opposite outcomes, or are even duplicate efforts leveraging different technologies, all because their focus is more on wants over needs for their capability.

So how do we move from thinking in wants to acting on needs?  It starts with transparency and alignment to the organizations' strategies.

How many people in your organization know and understand the strategies that are key to delivering value to your customers?  How many more define their initiatives around those strategies?  Unfortunately, the answer is very few. 

To start you need to create a Portfolio Valuation scoring model that is tied to your strategies and then provides a scoring mechanism that is aligned to Objectives and Key Results.  The key results form the basis of the value factors that will generate a score for each initiative.

By aligning the scoring engine to strategies and having the value factors aligned to metric outcomes, we can apply the scoring model across the organization holistically.  This is key to moving from a wants to needs conversation in the organization.

Having implemented this model in several organizations what happens at the leader level is that they have a harder time justifying investments that they want if they have low scores associated with them.  How do you convince leadership that it’s a good idea to invest a million dollars in a project with a value score of .5?  The answer is it’s not easy.

At one organization that had been trying to make the case to invest in a new ERP system with no success, we were able to tell the story better when leadership saw that they were investing large sums of money into low-value returns.   So the scoring model isn’t just to stop you from working on the wrong things, it also informs future investments to support fact-based decisions.

Value needs to be the driving focus of any organization as you have a limited amount of investment capital for software development.  Adding useless features that don’t align to strategy and have low-value returns is a waste of money

Additionally building things you don’t need adds bloat to your tech stacks as this code still has to be maintained and supported long-term.  The cost of any feature is never just related to its development cost. 

Moving from Project to Team based Funding in Agile

When we move to Agile we typically form our teams and then happily keep our waterfall project based funding structure in place.

We do this for a few reasons:

1. We think it’s the only way to show the cost of the work that we are asking to be delivered.
2. Projects are easily understood from an operational standpoint as they have a defined start and end date which is tightly aligned with the cost of the project.
3. It’s the way we’ve always done it.

As part of our project based funding model we have an annual project funding request process, where we  spend weeks/months identifying the things that we think are important (note I’m not using the word valuable here) so that we can obtain funding.  Things move above or below the approval line and when the dust settles we have a book of work that is committed to, with freshly minted project plans and a cadre of project managers to manage the money we just gave to these projects.

An annual project funding request process also means that we ask for what we need and then everything else we may or may not need.  We ask for a Ferrari when perhaps all we need is a good dependable family sedan.

There is power in money, who has it and who controls it typically drives what gets funded and what doesn’t.  It’s not uncommon for Sr. Leadership to commit to work even though their team doesn’t have any experience in the product solely to get the money to keep their teams funded and employed.

If you see a lot of potential waste here then you are correct.  We see waste just in the amount of people and money needed to manage our project money.  If a money market fund had as much overhead associated with it, I and everyone else would leave because that overhead just cuts into profitability. 

Next let’s more waste related to developing the stuff we didn’t need and may not actually use.  All of this extra stuff we develop has an expense associated with it and this is a long term expense.  We have it built into our architecture negatively impacting our systems scalability, performance and security.  We have to test it every time we build new stuff.  Bet you didn’t take that into account when you did your Cost/Benefit analysis for the project.

When we move to Agile we have an ability to really simplify our IT funding function.  It’s really quite simple – it’s the cost of your team. 

In most organizations this cost typically hovers around ~$40k per sprint or over ~2 million annually.  So as a financial manager trying to manage things like cash flow, depreciation and the like, this makes financial reporting much simpler.  Each team becomes a fixed line item cost on my balance sheet and operating statements.  I don’t have to worry about cost overruns from project funding since the team is a fixed cost.  Product Owners ensure our teams work on the most valuable things in a consistent manner and at the end of the year we should/can be able to gauge the value of that work to some accuracy.

So here’s a challenge that we face, how do we actually assess value?  How do we value things like reducing technical debt to make applications technically better?  How do we value writing an input validation security framework that makes our application safer for the user and ourselves?  How do we value things that our customers aren’t asking for, but in the end benefit from?  That is the core element of software development, there is significant value in the things that the customer never sees yet we place little effort or priority in delivering these elements.  Instead we focus on the visual functionality and throw quality and architecture down the drain in favor of meeting project timelines.

If you get the fact that you have a fixed development cost it actually should foster better conversations regarding what is really valuable for the entire organization to be working on.  Not your pet projects, not the projects you agree to only to get funding to keep your people employed, that’s not how real value and efficiency happens and it’s time we stop thinking that it does.

Agile highlights very quickly that an organizations planning and funding functions are broken. It also typically becomes clear that we don’t have a real grasp on what our real value streams are and finding them often means removing political barriers that have built up over years.  Agile requires that we redefine what value is and organize our delivery across these streams over organizational silos.

The traditional PMO also goes under a dramatic shift, moving from managing projects and funding to ensuring that programs align to the organizations value streams, are well understood and organizational impediments are removed for the teams.

So if you are looking to move your organization to Agile you must understand that your funding and planning functions must change to align to a new mindset and paradigm.  Funding is easy in Agile, really it is (remember it’s the cost of your team), uncovering your value streams and maximizing the work that flows to your teams that delivers that value, now that’s harder (but not impossible).

Launching SoundAgile Consulting

I've been involved with Agile with many different organizations now for over 12 years. In these years I've primarily been involved with being a contributing individual over a being an Agile coach.

The business of Agile has grown to a significant size and has now become a product that is sold to businesses who want to move their organization to Agile.  The very people who started Agile off as a movement have splintered off into several factions, each having their own opinion or approach in how to help organizations adopt Agile as a capability within their organization.  We now have Scrum, SAFe, DAD and LeSS to name a few in our acronym vocabulary.

Agile can indeed bring about valuable changes to an organizations ability to deliver software product more quickly.  These areas of Agile are fairly thought out, User Stories, Continuous Integration, Automation and Scrum.  You can move your development teams to a faster pace with some focus on specific team and development techniques that require some time to learn with some level of ease.

What Agile is struggling with is at the organizational level.  The Agile manifesto is specifically focused on building software better with a goal of delivering high value and quality software to our organizations.  A noble cause for sure and one that was sorely needed, given the changes in our software capabilities over the past 20 years.

Sr. Leadership however hasn't changed much, still managing in a large up front analysis budgeting process which creates a painful friction between fast moving product delivery teams and slow moving hierarchical management structures .

For those organizations who are being sold Agile as a product that will deliver 'x' benefits know this about what is occurring.  These organizations are finding people who have done 'some' to 'no' real Agile, meaning they haven't actually worked on an Agile team. Getting people who have the 'right' certifications doesn't provide those people with the ability to coach teams in the reality of Agile, only the theory of Agile and their current frameworks.

They are also focused only on the product development area of your business, letting you believe that you will receive huge benefits from moving to Agile without the corresponding changes necessary throughout your entire organization to support a fast paced product delivery teams.

Agile is not a small change management effort, rather it is a multi-year impact to your organization, that if done well will lead you to great success.  If done poorly will provide you with significant pain without any corresponding benefits.

I've spent many years thinking about what I might offer from an Agile consulting perspective and I've come to the conclusion that any Agile 'consulting' work that I would want to engage in must include both Sr. Leadership down and the team level.

Another thing I have concluded is that successful organizations that want to become Agile, must do so with a much smaller footprint of coaching.  You don't need full-time coaches for a long period of time.  In relying on full time coaches you are asking them to be your organizational Agile cop over owning the change within your organization.  The most successful Agile organizations I've worked in never had an Agile coach. Let me repeat that, never had an Agile a coach.  Instead they owned the move to Agile from the top down.  They provided the opportunity for teams to be empowered and fail and were not afraid to change organizational processes when they became impediments to improving Agilty.

SoundAgile will provide two levels of support and coaching for your organization.

1. Team Level - Coaching and training will be accomplished through a combination of online training videos, 1:1 coaching and targeted onsite sessions for specific techniques such as Discovery/User Story Mapping, User Story Writing and Behavior Driven Development.
2. Management Level - This will cover every management level in your organization, especially focusing in on your most impacted people, your technology managers.  Coaching and training will again be accomplished utilizing videos, 1:1 coaching and probably most importantly, targeted 1-2 day sessions that will continue for a multi-year time period. These sessions will provide for a longer term inspect and adapt change management process.

I'm really excited to be launching SoundAgile and am looking forward to working with people and organizations as they engage and encounter this thing called Agile.

SoundAgile will be live within the next two weeks.  I look forward to working with people who are motivated to move to Agile and make it work for them and their organizations.

Top Down or Bottom Up - Large Scale Agile Adoption

So I've worked in both large and small organizations where we have gone through an Agile adoption or the phrase of the day, Transformation. Having seen both sides of the coin I started realizing that you have two paths to take when considering moving your organization to an Agile delivery methodology.

I use the phrase delivery, because I think at the end of the day that is what we are talking about.  Strip away the manifesto's goals of conversation over documentation, accepting change, etc...What are are really talking about is moving an organization from a Project delivery methodology to one that is Product delivery oriented.

What is the difference?  From a Management perspective actually quite large.

1. Project Delivery - These have very strong controls which move people to a new project.  Budgets are set up for the specific time period of the project and then up front requirements and design are completed in order to ensure that the project is fully ready to be engaged.  Project Managers manage all facets of the project via extensive project planning and plans.  Management receives up dates as to the project progress on a regular schedule, usually weekly. Resources are assigned either in full or in part, yet no one actually monitors nor can they really manage whether or not someone is working 25% on a particular project.  Projects tend to focus on reporting and there is high pressure to ensure that individual projects are green, which drives teams to deliver on the easiest and often less valuable parts of the project first and only at the end of the project is the hard work tackled, which reveals itself as budget overruns or timeline delays (or worse delivery of reduced scope).  Project reporting is elaborate and management receives project reports that are often sanitized.  Value is typically not delivered to the organization until the end of the project.
2. Product Delivery - The work that is done for a Product is centered around a value stream it delivers and the work is ongoing.  Teams are funded as a whole and are kept together long-term in order to maximize their productivity.  Work is planned out in short increments called Release Plans that span anywhere from 6-12 weeks, with 2 week sprints.  Management receives regular updates (2 weeks) but can access information radiators at anytime, transparency is the key and goal with Agile Product Delivery.  Teams commit to work in 2 week sprints and their commitment is key to building trust with Management.  As time goes by management can trust that both a teams abilities and productivity can be counted on.  Teams are focused on delivering high quality code to production every two weeks which brings value to the organizations investment in them along with the increased value in terms of new sales, reduced costs, etc...Feedback loops via Product Demonstrations provides management the ability to assess where they are going with the product and deliver not what was asked for up front (Project Delivery) but rather what is actually needed (Product Delivery).

So what does the difference between Project and Product delivery approaches have to do with Agile adoption, well everything.

Most Agile adoptions begin at the bottom of the organization with the teams tasked with developing new software.  These efforts are borne, as the Agile manifesto was, out of frustration with how software was being developed in their respective organizations.  Often management is aware of the issues these teams face but are unable or unwilling to make any changes to how things are currently working and why would they?  You learn very early in your career that rocking the boat is not something that goes over well with organizations, my first boss told me I couldn't by computers that weren't from IBM because you don't get fired if you buy IBM. The message is that if anything goes wrong you need to point to well-known names, processes, etc.. with which to blame or use as support.  To think that this doesn't go on today is to place your head in the proverbial sand.

Though we can have great success with bottom up Agile adoptions with respect to improved productivity within small groups/teams, the overall Project oriented organization is typically still in place.  Management still wants to see project plans, have things 'planned' out for up to an entire year, they aren't comfortable with the fuzzy feel of product roadmaps.  They want commitments, even false ones, so that when things fail they can point to the fact that they had all of their planning in place.

For Agile to really take hold, Sr. Leaders need to change the way that they manage both their people and the work.  It starts first I think in understanding that we have not learned how to speak to management very well yet from an Agile/Scrum perspective.

We need to understand what management is really concerned about and then center our product delivery efforts around that.  One of the problems that we face with some of our leaders is that they themselves don't always know what to be focused on, they are looking at multiple balls in the air but at the end of the day as a Sr. Leader I think I have just a few things I should be focused on:

1. Growth - This is often related to sales, market and revenue.
2. Profits - Tightly aligned with the first item, our ability to make a consistent profit is what helps us continue to reinvest in our company.  Ever increasing revenue or sales without corresponding profits will eventually lead a company into bankruptcy, money isn't free and it is not endlessly available, in spite of what we think we see with new technology organizations.
3. Organizational Excellence - Because none of the above can happen unless you have a great organization.

Agile actually addresses all of the above, yet we spend more time talking about how we will improve our individual work efforts which causes us to  fail to tie this to the needs of management.  Management on the other hand often views the improvements that come from the bottom up approach as more of an anomaly rather than an organizational improvement worth adopting.

Trust is the missing component when it comes to conveying how Agile will make the entire organization better.

Agile isn't easy and it requires skills that frankly many of our Sr. Leaders lack or don't fully utilize and the politics of most organizations reward behavior that doesn't align with Agile principles such as transparency, open honest conversation and openly questioning the status quo.  We have people in power who got there by way of the non-Agile status quo and changing that means they have to learn how the new game is played in order to stay on top, it's much easier to keep things they way they are over learning how to navigate the new.

So how do we speak to our Sr. Leaders with respect to Agile?

1. Better ROI - Talk to any Finance executive about what they look at when purchasing a piece of equipment that will deliver revenue and you will hear them talk about Net Present Value of the investment, Positive Cash Flow and Depreciation costs.
   1. We improve ROI in Agile due to our focus on only the most valuable items.  In non-Agile project work often are working on features/functionality that may be important to someone inside the organization yet will bring little or no value to the organization.
   2. When we are able to start talking about the value streams of our organization, be they revenue, cost reduction or improving our brand image we begin to be able to have a better ROI conversation with management.
   3. We also positively impact ROI via higher levels of productivity gained with dedicated teams.
2. Flexibility - One of the most important elements that 21st century organizations require is the ability to be flexible enough to react to market forces or reactions.  Financing large projects far out into the future with the expectation of some level of return and no we don't really have great track records of predicting future ROI out very far into the future.  With Agile we provide the framework to identify the most valuable work for the business in small planning windows.
   1. Sr. Management needs to understand that this flexibility comes with an obligation to have consistent short term review windows as the team progresses so that we deliver what is actually needed and not what we thought we wanted.  You may have thought you needed a Ferrari when in fact what you needed was a mini-van, we provide the framework to course correct via Sprint reviews every two weeks.  If you plan all of your project up front for the Ferrari, we'll certainly try to make that happen, but in reality as the end of the project nears you will probably get the car but with a lawnmower engine and no brakes, it may look like a Ferrari but it won't operate like one nor will it provide the value the organization really needed.
3. Predictability - Another key element that we deliver with Agile is predictability and accountability.  Your teams will be much more accurate in planning and delivering in short-term 2 week sprints with a planning horizon of 6-8 weeks.  What management needs to look for is consistent delivery of the committed work that the team makes, commitment is everything.  What Wall Street analysts look for is a business that can provide a solid ROI, react responsibly to their competitors or even better be a market leaders and provide predictable results year in and year out.

So the question at hand is what is better a Top Down or Bottom Up adoption?  My money for long-term success is on the organization that can consume what Agile really means, not just to their development teams but the organization as a whole.  You can't BE Agile if you don't make the paradigm shift from command and control to one of collaborative and collective delivery.

Delivery Management vs Project Management

In Agile we have evolved from a 'project' oriented mindset to a product one. That is not to say that we don't undertake a something that looks like a project to build or enhance our products.  However in Product Management we are more focused on the ongoing nature of how our product will unfold, in shorter durations and without the end in site.

I believe successful Agile Project Managers need to focus on Delivery Management over Project Management.

What is the difference?

1. Delivery Management - Is the management of work in an iterative fashion that focuses on delivering product that delights our customers.  It is not focused on Time, Scope and Budget, but rather on customer experience, high quality code and low defects. Delivery management focused on long-term value and benefits over planned short-term objectives.
2. Project Management - is the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills and experience to achieve the project objectives. A project is a unique, transient endeavour, undertaken to achieve planned objectives, which could be defined in terms of outputs, outcomes or benefits.

Having been a project manager in a waterfall/PMI world before my move to Agile some of the mental challenges I faced included:

1. Lack of a plan - One of the first things I did as I was moving to Agile was to track the amount of 'change' that happened in one of my waterfall projects.  I created a Project Change Request for everything that was not originally identified in the Business Requirements and Technical Design Documents, assumptions that changed, scope, etc... This process drove my team absolutely crazy because as with all waterfall teams, we fear change requests, they are bad news to management.  However what this effort did was provide visibility to the type of change that happens in every single software development project (and these changes were never socialized outside of the team so they had nothing to worry about).
   1. Realization - 
      1. My project plans provided no real ability to know if a project was going to be successful, they looked good but didn't tell the real story of what was happening with the project team and what they were developing.
      2. Agile provided me with much more visibility to the real issues that a project team faced and that my project plan was really just a place holder for future Sprints.  I only needed to know that the Sprints were planned and then communicate what the team was committing to.  Once I had that information THEN I could hold them accountable.
2. Story Points over Time bases estimates - I had a really hard time initially wrapping my head around Story points over time and spent many an hour mentally putting the points back into hours.
   1. Realization -
      1. I finally stopped thinking in time once my team started 'delivering' consistent points and work for every sprint.  At that point all I ended up needing to know was the story points of work begin committed to.  The point here is as a Project Manager you need to instill good estimation behaviors with your team and hold them accountable, that IS your job.
      2. Velocity is the primary data point you want to focus on, consistent velocity = consistent delivery.  It's not your job to determine the What for the product but it is your job to ensure that what they commit to does get Delivered (though if you work to be a valued member of the team, you should definitely be able to provide input).
3. Status Reporting - Ah the bane of our existence as project managers and something that I had to deal with recently, the dreaded status report.  Honestly I hadn't been a project manager for many years and as a Manager I never needed one with Agile teams.  All I needed was a dashboard (Jira or Rally are the ones I'm most experienced with) to observe a teams backlog, Velocity and Progress towards a Roadmap they were working on.
   1. Realization - The status report will not every go away but I think you need to ensure that your reporting is consistent with the rest of your Agile processes.  Tools such as Jira and Rally provide you with abilities to manage Roadmaps, teams, budgets, etc... Everything is still there but your reporting needs to take advantage of the data elements within Agile, don't translate your Agile into a waterfall type status report.  This will only ensure that Sr. Management stays disconnected from Agile and the entire organization needs to be plugged into Agile and walk the walk.

If you are a traditional PMI type project manager and are moving to Agile here are some things you should consider:

1. You are not responsible for the success of a project/ delivery - Yeah I know it sounds wrong, but in Agile it is the TEAM that is responsible for delivery.  You need to plug into your team, get to know what they do, the challenges that they face, become a sounding board for ideas, get your hands dirty, learn how to test, etc...Becoming a valued member of the team is what moved me out of Project Management and into Quality Assurance. 9
2. Be an Agile advocate - Embrace agile so that you do more than go through the motions. Read, learn, join a meet up group, do more than just the minimum.  As a Project Manager you can help your organization get better at Being Agile, you have the connections and understanding of the organization that many in the technical side may not.
3. Don't be Defensive- As you will learn, Retrospectives should be frank and open conversations about what is working and more importantly not working in your processes.  Encourage your team to openly talk about issues, but protect them so that they can continue to work effectively as a team, remember attack the problem not the person.  For example at Disney where I both QA Manager and individual contributor my duties as QA Manager were getting in the way of my ability to test and give good feedback to the team.  They rightly called me out in a retrospective as being the issue for them not moving as fast as they could.  I was not defensive but understanding, that is what you want in Agile, because they were absolutely correct, I was the problem at that point.

So as you look at what you manage in traditional project management, understand that it is not the Project that you are delivering but a Product and Products have much longer life spans than projects.

You need to keep your teams focused in consistent and disciplined delivery that brings real value to your organization. If you are working on something that doesn't have value you should be questioning and challenging your team as to why.

Agile isn't easy, though I think it is often thought of as easy.  No Agile is very disciplined and when you undertake Agile it will highlight every inefficiency and poor process that exists in your organization today.  You simply cannot go fast until you address these issues.  As a Project Manager you can help drive this change.

GSD or Feeling Good about the Wrong Things

Over the past couple of years I have heard the term GSD used quite a bit as a means to describe high-performing individuals (note I did not say team). I have to admit that this is not an acronym that I was very familiar with, primarily GSD referred to my designation in college as someone who didn't want to join a fraternity, the politically correct term would be Gosh Darn Independent (And this is probably a great way to define who I have been throughout my career).

Before embarking on this post I did some quick google searches and came up with some thoughts on GSD:

1. The Urban Dictionary definition:
   1. GSD is brought about through severe bout of procrastination, not getting work done on a regular basis, therefore needing to set aside long amounts of time to disappear and get shit done.
2. What Spinks Thinks - http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/

The term, as it is used now is, Get Shit Done, which does sound great at first pass.  However when you start working with GSD as part of building a defined delivery process you start to see some very ugly things drop out of it:

• Heros - Those great people who came in and saved the day and got some serious shit done under intense pressure.  Never mind that the day they were saving maybe shouldn't have happened in the first place or even worse, the situation requiring them to save the day via GSD was of their own making, convienently lost in the thrill of GSD.
• Lack of Defined work - Who cares what I am doing so long as at the end of the day I can show you how much shit I got done.
• Lack of Plans - See above.

The problem as I see it with GSD is that we aren't asking ourselves a basic question - Are we doing the right shit at the right time?

Yes getting 'shit' done is good and getting it in done makes us feel good, however if there is no real process behind your way of getting shit done then you will be destined for unpredictable delivery of the work that brings your organization the most value.

I find in my experience that GSD is more about individual glory over a team (see my blog on Teams Deliver) which I find troubling on so many levels.

Organizations spend lot's of money having their technology teams deliver features that they believe bring value to the business and even though there may be many ways of delivering this value, ie Agile, Waterfall, Lean, I have yet to see GSD making its way into main stream product and project management lexicon.

Continuing my educational tour of the world of GSD I found a posting from two guys named Daniel Epstein and Pascal Finnette who appear to be individuals who provide support, coaching and services to technology entrepreneurs specifically regarding GSD:

1. GYSHIDO - A movement started a few years ago dedicated to The Art of Getting Your Shit Done.  They identified that their most intrinsic value as employees was that they got shit done, but in looking at their code of honor I see elements of good process, so is it possible thatGSD has some value?  Too soon to tell.  But here is their code of honor:
   1. Relentless focus - Focus on the 10% of your activities which drive most of the value. Relentlessly.
   2. Boring consistency - Do the right things over and over again. Consistency forms habits. Habits make hard things effortless.
   3. No Bullshit - Don't bullshit yourself or others. Apply brutal honesty and transparency to everything you do.
   4. No Meetings - Meetings come in only two forms: Standing or social. If it's social, it's over breakfast, lunch, coffee, dinner or drinks. If not - don't sit down.
   5. Follow up - Don't let others wait for your part of the job. Ever.
   6. Don't be an Asshole

As I read through their ethics I believe (I haven't talked with these guys) that their process could align with the agile type world.  Why?

• Many of the elements of what they believe is good GDS is what I consider good behavior of Agile teams:
  • Focus on the work that delivers the most value - Agile, 2 week sprints, deliver production ready features continually.
  • Consistency - Keep your Scrum Teams together, let them improve in estimation, execution, test automation, boring?  maybe, get shit done fast?  yes
  • No Bullshit - Retrospectives ask us to be brutally honest when things are working and fix what doesn't work.  Attack the problem not the person (see number 6 - Don't be an Asshole)
  • Follow-up - In Agile I always talk about how we need to think of minutes over hours when resolving issues that are blocking us from completing our work.

Agile teams focus on identifying the valuable 'thing' that we need to deliver and then develop lightweight plans to deliver it incrementally. I suspect that GSD has its roots in waterfall SDLC where a project would roll happily along, green week after week, oblivious or ignorant to how the project was actually unfolding.  Decisions made by the team that never surfaced had large impacts on scope and viability of the project.

GSD I believe emanates from the need for a project team to 'pull a rabbit' out of the hat in order to deliver the project 'on-time'.  My years as a waterfall PM saw this time and time again.  We fool ourselves into thinking that we can predict a large project from beginning to end all up front, you can't, period.

So when you are rewarded in a GSD organization they are ultimately is saying that the organization values chaos over effective planning and delivery.

PMO Role in Agile - Part 2

My initial blog seemed to have some interest judging by the number of views it's received so I'm guessing that it's a topic that many are looking for input on.   So I thought I'd provide some more thoughts as to what a PMOmight  look like in an Agile organization. One of the key things that changes with a traditional Project managed organization is that they must change to one that is Product managed.  What this means is that the organization changes the way that it funds its business by essentially providing Product Owners with Scrum teams that will deliver on their vision for their product.  Given this paradigm, along with the creation of the Scrum Master role, the PMO and subsequent project managers are left outside looking in.

Managing Product driven teams means that you are managing towards outcomes that delivery value over projects that deliver features.

In my previous post I provided some suggestions as to what individual Project Managers could do to make themselves more valuable and productive to their teams.

In this post I will suggest a PMO structure that focuses on the Portfolio view and leaves the operational execution of the roadmap to the Scrum Teams and Product Owner.

For this structure to work the organization needs good Scrum Masters and preferable ones that aren't also individual contributors for their team.

The structure of the PMO will be lighter than you might think is right, but I'll argue that if you have the same number of Scrum Masters and Project Managers you will set up role confusion that will make your entire project management process cumbersome and less productive.

The PMO structure would look something like this:

I think one of the things that a PMO organization needs to be aware of is that their focus is not on control of projects and people but on how teams are performing.

With this structure you have a thinner level of Project Managers who are focused on Program level Product Management (PPM new acryonym anyone?). Your Project Management function becomes one of oversight of Scrum Masters and working closely with Program Managers in other Product groups who probably will have cross org dependencies.  The Program Manager level in this structure is more about working to ensure that teams are working on the right things based upon the Product Roadmap and escalating when individual team priorities become out of line with the overal corporate product objectives.

What we want with a PMO is confidence and how we do that historically is to place controls, gateways and processes designed to show that teams are checking off boxes that we believe represent how a successful project should unfold (aka Project Governance)

How we do that in an Agile organization is to ensure that our teams we have a clear Product roadmap, that we are performing effective planning both in the areas of Product Discovery and Release Planning, that teams are provided time to review and estimate the work that they are being asked to commit to AND ensure that teams perform continual inspect and adapt cycles via Retrospectives.

If teams are allowed to form into solid high performing teams what you get from that is an organization that learns how to estimate accurately, which leads to consistent velocity which in turns leads to predictability....which is what we in the PMO (and Sr Management) are looking for, simple right?

What I learned years ago from my Project Management days is that Agile actually provides you with much more visibility and transparency about what is happening with your commitments,  providing you as the stewards of the product an ability to have fact based conversations with stakeholders who rarely understand the complexity of what they are asking for.