Course: Agile PMO

Many organisations have a Project Management Office whose responsibility it is to oversee coordination and quality of project delivery within the organisation.  The PMO takes a project-centric view of software delivery, and apply project-style constraints.

Project-style constraints limit and sometimes completely inhibit Agile delivery practices.  The focus of project-style constraints is on meeting the "iron triangle" of scope, cost and time, with scope usually being decided and agreed in advance of starting the project work.

Agile aims to discover the scope of work over the duration of an initiative, and to continue iterating on solutions until the objectives and outcomes are achieved.  To enable teams using Agile ways of working, it is important that the PMO does not apply these project-style constraints to Agile teams, but to find other ways to govern and steer an initiative.

This course is for people working in software delivery and who need to improve the amount of work and value being deliverd, or need to demonstrate higher utilisation of people within the IT group, or need to reduce the overhead of project management time and effort, or who simply need to shift teams to greater Agile adoption.

Types of roles that should attend this course include; Enterprise Agile Coaches, Transformation Leaders, Project Managers, Project Management Office staff, Program Managers, Portfolio Managers, Delivery Managers, Org Designers, Agile Designers, and so on. 

This course is open to any members of an IT team, and also to managers who need to better understand project delivery challenges and opportunities to improve their delivery model.

This course is for people with intermediate to advanced skills in project delivery and Agile delivery.  It is designed to help organisations that have been running a Project Management Office to oversee their IT department and their software projects, or if not a PMO, who otherwise operate their IT teams using a project-delivery model.

This course is designed to help people overseeing project delivery to change their processes, funding model and delivery model with the goal of delivering value faster, being able to adapt to changing priorities and circumstances very quickly, and enable long-standing teams to deliver the work.

MODULE 1

How to reduce governance overhead in a PMO

• How to change annual planning and project-based funding to capacity-based funding and continuous planning and execution
• How to make outcomes and benefits the focus of planning and progress
• How to report and track progress for an executive audience

MODULE 2

How to deliver a portfolio in increments

• How to break down a portfolio or work into its valuable components, and deliver initiatives incrementally with the ability to rapidly re-priotise
• How to change the prioritisation model to optimise for small, valuable deliverable increments
• How to change priorities when planned work delivers reduced value

MODULE 3

How to manage a portfolio pipeline using Lean practices

• How to continuously plan streams of high-value work to be delivered
• How to govern and manage a pipeline of constantly changing work
• How to visualise a pipeline of work for an executive audience

Moving from traditional project delivery model to a capacity-based delivery model gives many great benefits:

1. Project-based delivery requires a lot of work to be done in advance to get a project approved, and funding agreed.  This work in the lead up to the project kick-off represents waste in that it doesn't deliver any value to end users, customers and stakeholders.  By moving to a capacity-based funding model, you can report savings from cutting out the cost of effort in the preparation stage of projects.
   
   
2. Capacity-based funding means that teams are permanently formed, and always busy working on the most valuable work at any time.  In project-based delivery, a team of people must be formed to work on a project, and at a time when they are available which often causes delays and waiting for people to free up.  Also, teams often can't make a start until approvals have been made for funding the project, or architecture of the solution, and so on.  These delays are also waste when people are not delivering value for end users, customers and stakeholders because they are forced to wait.
   
   
3. Utilisation is the most obvious metric that can be measured to demonstrate that people are working to the maximum of their time and capacity.  Utilisation will always be higher in a capacity-based model as long as work is contiuously brought to the teams.
   
   
4. Capacity-based delivery teams are able to deliver a higher amount of value for the organisation, because work is organised and prioritised around value and not the delivery of scope items.  Scope items in project-based delivery is not guaranteed to deliver value, and only the end users, customers and stakeholders can report that they have received increased value.  Capacity-based delivery confirms that value has been delivered much more rapidly than project-based delivery.
   Another reason is that low-value work can be stopped much easier and more readily in capacity-based delivery model because the work is much shorter, and requires less effort to get approved and started than in project-based delivery.
   
   
5. Reporting and progress tracking changes to focus on achievement of objectives and outcomes, and progress against longer term goals.  This allows management to focus their efforts on goal achievement using shorter intervals to measure progress against outcomes, and better feedback and indicators of success.  Managers reduce the time they spend ensuring projects are on track and making decisions to support each project.
   
   
6. Stakeholder satisfaction is better in a capacity-funded model because initiatives can be more easily time-sliced in a capacity-funded model, meaning that teams are not committed to long-running projects which prevents other more urgent work being prioritised in the short term.  Also, value is delivered quicker and more frequently to stakeholders in Agile delivery through short, rapid iterations.