Your Questions, Answered: Part Four-- Agile and the PMO
| by Sydni Neptune, PMP, CSM
Organizational change management is the key.
[Editor's Note: Continuing our series of responses to questions asked by our webinar attendees, please welcome our Agile SME Sydni Neptune to the fray! The recorded webinar can be viewed here.]
Q: What are the areas of work that can have the greatest impact to moving forward with agile transformation and improving maturity? Of course the answer is, it depends, but all things being equal, what areas have successful organizations focused to make significant, measurable, and valuable updates to the process of one’s PMO?
A: A formal organizational change management effort to inform and manage the transformation to agile can have a tremendous impact. This change effort should be driven top down from leadership.
Other areas of impact include:
- Benefits realization. Funded work needs to show alignment to organizational strategies and be regularly reviewed for progress against planned benefits.
- Performance Measurement
- A pilot program to showcase "live" the agile transformation journey and/or the outcomes of new behavior(s)
Q: We are a PMO inside our IT department who also has teams using Agile. We struggle with roles and responsibilities between what the Product Owner (PO), Scrummaster and PM should do during the project process. Is there a good guide that would help us understand what parts of the project we are responsible for delivering?
A: Mapping the responsibilities of the traditional roles to the new roles is a great way to understand the transformational differences in roles as well as reveal in a more clear, concise way, the potential gaps in roles. Each company needs to understand who is empowered to make decisions. The PO should be one who is empowered to make decisions that could affect scope of the effort (project). Some companies are able to make a complete transformation to support agile product development, but many companies today do not relinquish or empower agile roles to support the “ideal” or textbox agile methodology / workflow. The latter companies usually end up with a ‘hybrid’ project / product workflow where traditional decision making roles are still in place and development teams use agile to manage work.
For more insights into organizational transformation, download our new white paper, Establishing the Adaptive Organization, here.