Journyx Project Management Blog

How to Work Together

The best way to help your PMO to become more agile, and vice versa, is to get these groups together and focus on their similarities instead of their differences. For example, both groups are interested in prioritizing projects to ensure that the most important ones receive adequate resources and budget. They are also concerned with project execution, though their definitions of success might vary between staying within budget and time constraints and meeting customer expectations.

When it comes to a difference of opinion, compromise is necessary. Creating an agile PMO in your organization will take a bit of diplomacy and mediation. It will be necessary to find ways to get each team to give a little ground for the greater good. For example, the PMO can compromise by being flexible and open to altering plans and schedules as needed, while agile developers can compromise by tracking their time in order to keep everyone updated on their progress.
Organizations with both PMPs and agile developers should not hesitate in getting these two talented groups to work together. With the right kind of management processes in place, managers can capitalize on the strengths of each group for successful project execution and increased return on investments.

Agile Development Is Here to Stay

Agile development continues to gain popularity in the IT world for a number of reasons. One of its key principles is constant communication between developers and customers, which helps in maximizing customer satisfaction and managing scope creep intelligently. Recently, an executive at a well-known financial institution told me that agile is important because it allows developers to build and demo often, enabling customer advocates to note when something needs to be corrected.

Agile allows companies to keep their fingers on the pulse and adapt themselves to the needs of customer or the market very quickly. “Agile teams are cross-functional, self organizing and self managing,” Sulaima asserts. With principles such as these, it’s not difficult to see how agile development teams can be extremely effective.

Joint Business Value

Combining the strengths of the PMO and the development team is a smart move. With a PMO to keep an eye on things, project risk can be managed much more effectively. Problems along the way are recognized and often resolved in a timely manner. In addition, the agile group can help the PMO to become more flexible and customer-oriented. Recently, Evan Campbell, CTO and agile devotee, was quoted in a project management article as saying,

“A strategic PMO can be a great asset to agile teams,” notes CTO and agile devotee Evan Campbell in a recent article, “[... by] keeping an eye on performance of company assets in the portfolio and working with the product owner and scrum master to make sure the metrics of projects are assessed and value is delivered.”

Agile development is often interpreted as completely at odds with the structure and constraints of the project management office (PMO). Yet it does not have to be this way. Creating an agile PMO that bridges the gap between these two significant groups can help organizations to prioritize projects and allocate resources much more effectively. Here’s how to keep both project managers and agile developers happy while leveraging the strengths of each for successful project execution.

Who Needs a PMO Anyway?

The PMO brings significant advantages to the organization. For one thing, its focus on metrics is often crucial to the health and success of a project portfolio. It can also facilitate communication between project team members, project managers and those higher up in the organization. Tamara Sulaiman, a project management consultant, explains it this way:

“Let’s say you are a manager or leader in an agile organization. Your development teams have implemented Scrum and are now working toward release. You’ve got the Scrum of Scrums working so that teams can communicate with each other about cross-team dependencies and impediments on a daily basis. But there’s a gap, isn’t there? As a manager, how do you effectively and efficiently measure progress, manage risk and keep your eye on the big picture across these agile teams? Wouldn’t it be great to have an easy way to communicate budget and schedule information at the program level to the organization?”

While the agile worker is focused mainly on development at a fast pace, the PMO can help to keep the rest of the organization informed about what is going on. Scope changes, delays or quality issues can arise at any time, and when they do, they must be communicated to all of the stakeholders who can adjust expectations accordingly and take the appropriate course of action.

Remember when we posted about the competition between scrum and waterfall? Elizabeth Larson is back with a second part to her article on which method is “winning.” In this installment, she highlights the similarities between the two:

1. Both have processes to request, approve and prioritize changes. Both put focus for the approval and prioritization on the Business (product owner/sponsor/SMEs).
2. Both stress the importance of communications.
3. Both allow for more or less rigor, as appropriate.
4. Both find communications easier when the teams are co-located.
5. Both face more challenges with virtual teams.
6. Both have processes to manage the scope.
7. Both estimate the work involved in business analysis whether phase (s), releases, iterations/sprints.

She also gives waterfall the advantage in a few scenarios, including effectively using the role of the BA to define requirements, defining the business need and business case, and getting from the “as-is” to the “to-be.” Do you agree?

A new Project Times article has highlighted the reason why traditional PM methods and agile methods for risk management collide. The author notes that both are valuable, but he supports the agile way for the following reason:

The variability in complex software projects is what undermines traditional risk management in my view. We try to expend all of our effort in up-front risk management. Rather, we should expend most of our efforts towards figuring out what we do and do not know. We should decide how to design and code this particular widget I.e. do some of the project work before trying to predict risk. Let the risks emerge from our efforts rather than trying to predict them.

What’s the best way to go about integrating traditional and new agile methods, both in risk management and in other areas? The best way is to find common ground and understand exactly which aspects of each best apply to your particular organization.

Towards the start of the year, we blogged about the Project Times list of the Top PM Trends for 2010. Now Project Smart has compiled their own list, “More 2010 Project Management Trends.”

Drumroll, please:

• Enterprises Continue to Look for Efficiencies in Process and Technology
• Agile and Lean Processes are Overtaking Waterfall
• PMs are Becoming Independent Consultants
• Virtual and Independent Teams Will Be More Prevalent
• Social Media Will Become a Norm
• Project Manager and Business Analyst Roles are Converging

The overwhelming consensus is that technology is more significant than ever before in the business world. People are finding that they need to automate processes for increased efficiency in addition to transparency, visibility and communication. Agile is also taking over where waterfall software development processes used to reign.

How will these changes affect your organization? Have they already?

Project Times has published an article by Elizabeth Larson on the competition between the two types of software development processes, agile and waterfall.

I think people like a good fight. Certainly the media seems to, as is evident in the world of politics, sports, and entertainment to name a few. In the world of business analysis the current fight seems to pit Agile methods against the Waterfall approach. For the next several blogs we’ll have a Scrum vs. Waterfall match. In corner #1, representing the Agile methods, we have the Scrum framework. In corner #2, representing Waterfall, we have the “traditionalists.”

Larson awards both rounds to agile. Why? It allows the team to adjust estimates and deadlines based on real feedback and progress, and it makes things “easy and practical.” Agile is clearly gaining ground in the software development and project management worlds, and it shows no signs of stopping.

–

Related stories:

E-Commerce Times: How to Create an Agile PMO

gantthead.com: The Agile PMO Role

Projects@Work: Agile Rising

Most of us have heard that IT projects as a whole have a very high rate of failure. TechRepublic has a new blog post up on 10 ways PMs can avoid catastrophic mistakes throughout the process:

1. Learn from other’s mistakes
2. Do your research first
3. Have a plan
4. Follow standards and use templates
5. Communicate and coordinate with others
6. Allow enough time
7. Reuse proven code
8. Use checklists
9. Test, test, test… and carefully review your work
10. Test again with a third party

It seems that anticipating mistakes (learn from others, do your research, have a plan) and thinking about how to avoid or react to them (testing, communication) is half the battle. What else would you add to the list?

CIO published the findings of a Forrester Report in a new article, “The 10 Key Capabilities of Next-Generation Project Managers.” Forrester interviewed IT and project management professionals in order to learn what the future of project management will look like. Here are the top 10 capabilities they found:

1. Emotional Intelligence
2. Adaptive Communication
3. People Skills
4. Management Skills
5. Flexibility
6. Business Savvy
7. Analytical Skills
8. Customer Focus
9. Results-Orientation
10. Character

Another important finding is that project managers must be willing to embrace agile methods in the future in order to keep up with IT and software development trends. According to Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush,

In an Agile software delivery environment, the traditional command-and-control approach of project managers is counter-productive. [...] Instead of defining roles and making sure team members are following project management processes and procedures to a T, next generation project managers need to focus on improving collaboration and removing obstacles and distractions so that project team members can get their work done on time and on budget.

For more information on how to integrate agile and project management, check out the newest article by our CEO, Curt Finch, entitled “How to Create an Agile PMO.”

Okay, so we’ve talked about giving to your colleagues, your customers, and to other companies through the products or services you provide. Can anyone think of something we might have left out this holiday season?

How about giving yourself a gift for all the hard work you did all year?

It’s called PTO, and we all have it (hopefully!). If you take your vacations like good girls and boys, this message is not for you. It is for the workaholics out there who check their work email from home, get in early and stay late and never take time off. This may seem like a great way to advance your career and help your business, but in reality, all you are doing is setting yourself up for burn-out, and fast.

Whether you are about to get all of your 2009 PTO upfront in January, or you have some left over from this year, do yourself a favor and take a few days off. I’ll bet the people you work with will thank you, because a rested you will be much more pleasant to work with.

- April Boland, Journyx Communications Coordinator