Over the past few years, we’ve been working in scaling agile to the enterprise with the help of Lean, and in particular the Agile PMO. We’re seeing growing interest and adoption of these concept among companies that have being practicing agile for several years.
I personally have presented regularly on the subject at various fora, including PMI and APLN Chapter events and the Scrum Gathering.
Briefly, we believe that the work of senior managers on agile teams should involve:
- Project identification and selection of new projects, and termination or re-purposing of existing projects;
- Portfolio tracking of in-flight projects;
- Resource management via the creation, care and feeding of stable, business platform teams; and
- ROI and quality assurance of agile adoption.
These are admittedly tough practices to implement in any organization. So, it was a delightful surprise when I recently contracted with Steve D, the owner of a small contracting business based in the DC-Baltimore region. Steve started and finished on time, delivered high quality work and interestingly to me, worked with a very small team. In conversations, it became quite clear that Steve had both agile project management and some elements of agile portfolio management down pat.
Check out this interview with Steve to see what I’m talking about. I assure you you will find it delightful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_qWOHdi5aM
