“Some things are just done by themselves. Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed.”
― David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
With project economy on the rise, everybody agrees on projects as the basic management structures in every organization –public/private, non/for profit– at every industry, anywhere in the world. Wherever an operational change is needed, or a new product needs to be built, this must be managed as a project.
Nowadays, more organizations are interested in project management maturity improvement. With the boom in agile project management, and the adoption of holacracy as a management and government system in many organizations, there is a decrease in the application of formal maturity models, such as OPM3, OPM, etc., and a movement towards role-based distributed authority agile approaches like SAFe, DA, LeSS, etc.
Organizational Project Management maturity can be managed top-down, aiming compliance to formal frameworks, or bottom-up, guiding teams on basic principles and waiting for people to do the rest. This is the approach that agile methods have followed, with extraordinary effectiveness, diffusion and application.
Let’s take Scrum, for instance. This methodological framework could not possibly be any simpler: 3 roles, 3 artifacts and 4 ceremonies.
Scrum effectiveness, however, is based on the huge amount of implicit good practices occurring unnoticed, just because people follow certain ceremonies:
- Requirement management.
- Prioritization, decomposition, decoupling.
- Adaptive planning: progressive, product, release, biweekly, daily planning.
- Value driven delivery following iterative-incremental life cycles.
- Problem detection and resolution.
- Communication and transparency inside/outside the team.
- Team performance.
- Continuous improvement.
- Separation of the what (stakeholders, product owner) and the how (development team).
- Expectations management and stakeholder engagement.
- There is no estimate padding, no scope creep, deadlines are always met.
- Etc.
Only coaches need to be aware of what is happening behind the scene. Team members “are simply being swung” by ceremonies. The outcome, at the organization level, is maturity. It blossoms spontaneously, without trying, just organic and naturally.
Could we translate the Spotify case –top maturity at operation management– to maturity at project management, for any organization?
Some good practices to guide organizations to Agile Organizational Project Management are: 1) collaborative roles; 2) project status reporting; 3) many stakeholders watching; and 4) process simplification using online tools.
1) Collaborative Roles
- Demand Management: People who propose projects and monitor performance.
- Supply Management: People who use human and material resources to execute projects.
2) Project Status Reporting
There is a high correlation between project success and effective monitoring and control. Projects failing seriously, with long delays and high over costs, all of them suffer from bad practices on project status reporting. Conversely, successful projects implement good governance with rigorous project status reviews: measuring deviations against baselines, estimating forecasts, taking corrective actions to meet management goals on schedule, cost, scope, quality, etc. Project steering committees oversight project performance. Project managers report global performance, scope, schedule, cost, etc.
3) Many Watchful Stakeholders
4) Process Simplification using Online Tools
