Digital transformation is affecting Project Management Offices. Project management organizations see how their projects grow exponentially, but their team doesn’t grow. Overnight, senior managers authorize projects with a high technological component, involve the organization as a whole, but requirements are not clear. Project steering committees ask for status reports, risk reports, cost forecasts, etc. Project managers ask for resources, methodological guidance, etc. Teams ask for agile courses, coaches, collaborative workspaces, tools, etc. Many business representatives still see agile as a passing fad , only applicable to software projects, etc.
At this point, the corporate PMO knows that the way to manage adaptive projects should not be predictive, but agile. Any Agile PMO will try to implement certain paradigms:
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- Projects should be value driven better than planned driven.
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- Business representatives should be engaged to provide continuous feedback.
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- Business analysis professionals need to focus on “what”. Development team need to focus on “how to”.
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- The PMO should not centralize project management because it would become a bottleneck. It should not introduce bureaucracy or approval workflows. The PMO must achieve more with less.
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- The PMO should encourage distributed project management models: project managers, program managers, portfolio managers, functional managers, resource managers, etc., should share project management from their respective knowledge areas, so that the PMO can focus their work better.
PMPeople tool does not avoid the necessary agile face to face collaboration within teams, participation in the different ceremonies, the use of other tools to communicate, information radiation, virtual boards, etc. PMPeople facilitates all the collaboration among people involved in project management, accessing with the mobile application or via the Web, enhancing value orientation and eliminating waste. PMPeople also facilitates agile scaling when large teams need to collaborate.
Thanks to PMPeople, the PMO can go from being a bottleneck, to a facilitating unit that delivers more value projects successfully, faster and cheaper.
Agile Project Management
Agile frameworks do not mention the role of the project manager because they were designed for product management, not project management. However, the PM role is required when the organization approves a project that must be completed within a certain period of time and below a certain budget. Professional PMs are responsible, among other things, for the agile project to end on time and on budget, meeting stakeholders’ requirements. In predictive projects –those which follow a waterfall lifecycle– most requirements can be agreed beforehand. If requirements are set, we can set the scope to estimate cost, schedule, etc., and finally we can get a detailed project plan, which can be used as a baseline to compare actual performance so that we can take corrective actions to meet the project management goals. PMBOK® Guide divide project management into 5 process groups, which can overlap in time, although for simplicity they are presented in a sequential order:
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- Initiating Process Group: The organization debates whether the project must be done or not. If so, the sponsor approves it and signs a document called the project charter.
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- Planning Process Group: A project management plan is developed by the project management team develops, with the help of experts. The project plan will serve as a reference to execute and control the project. Some predictive projects practice progressive elaboration planning, that is, the plan is being versioned as better information is known, but normally the project plan is quite stable, as is usually the case in engineering or construction projects.
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- Executing and Controlling Process Groups: These two groups are connected. Executing group is designed to execute the plan. Controlling group aims to periodically monitor performance, taking corrective actions if needed to meet the project management goals.
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- Closing Process Group: Once all the deliverables have been accepted by the client, formal closing is followed, and product, service or result is transitioned to the requesting organization.
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- Iterative: meaning feedback is received at regular intervals.
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- Incremental: meaning that the product is elaborated like the layers of an onion, first the heart with the most important features and then the successive less important layers.
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- The product grows with new features while refining the ones already built. In each demonstration, a potentially shippable product is shown. If the release is cancelled any time, a working product could be delivered.
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- Product Owner (PO) is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the DT. The PO is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog, which is a prioritized list of requirements (user stories, features, epics, etc).
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- Development Team (DT) consists of professionals who do the work of delivering a potentially releasable Increment of “Done” product at the end of each iteration. DT shows a Product Increment at the iteration review. Only DT members create the Increment. DT members break features down into technical tasks and manage them in the Iteration Backlog. They self-organize to deliver value at the end of each iteration.
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- Agile Coach (CO): is responsible for promoting and supporting agile methods as defined, helping everyone understand theory, practices, rules, and values. The CO is a servant-leader for the DT, helping everyone understand which of their interactions with the DT are helpful and which aren’t, and helping change these interactions to maximize the value created by the DT.
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- Customers (CU): are the stakeholders that must provide directions to get the value. They are considered to be part of the agile team, but their level of commitment is lower.
PMPeople for Agile Projects
In PMPeople, any PM can create a project inside a Business Unit (BU). Although the project has not yet been formally approved by the organization, PM can initiate the project entering the definition data, the summary of the business case, the project charter, the extended team and the stakeholder register:
PMPeople for Big Agile Teams
As proposed in SAFe to scale the work done by several agile teams when they need to build a product, a synchronization is needed among team increments at the end of each iteration, summing up in what is called a Program Increment (PI). Usually, each PI consists of 5 iterations, each iteration taking 2 weeks.
