That was a quote from Sanjiv Augustine, who presented this past week at the DC chapter of the APLN. His talk was titled “The Agile PMO: Scaling Agile through Adaptive Governance”. You can download the slides from his company’s website, but Sanjiv offered a few great points you won’t find in there.
“If you consistently deliver garbage, then all you have is a repeatable process”
Sanjiv offered us this point when explaining WHY you want a Project Management Office (PMO). Too often, project managers are told to serve the PMO, when it should be the PMO working to help projects be successful. The whole point of a PMO should be to improve project delivery, not merely achieving policy compliance. If your PMO can derive its tasks from this kind of focus, then you’re already ahead of the game.
“An Agile PMO is NOT a Scrum team”
After explaining what a PMO should do, Sanjiv gave us an idea of what it should look like. In particular, it should not consist of dedicated resources. Instead, it should be a standing committee, comprised of representatives from each of the portfolio’s projects. In that way, the projects retain the ultimate authority over the process. The committee discusses and debates what decisions should be made to support project delivery: switching staff, moving budget, or even killing a failing project. If there are no dedicated staff on a PMO, and it’s charged with supporting (as opposed to delivering), then by definition, it’s not a cross-functional Scrum team. This was a fascinating model, because it flies in the face of the conventional PMO, having full-time staff mandating decisions to project teams from on high….a model which seems to contribute to the very high kill rate for PMOs themselves.
“I make more money finishing smaller projects one at a time”
One of the more compelling parts of Sanjiv’s talk was when he wasn’t actually talking. Specifically, he showed off a video interview of his home renovation contractor, Steve. It turns out that Steve is a construction guy that embraces Lean management principles. He explained in the interview that when he had a larger crew, working several projects at once, he had nothing but headaches. He wasn’t able to guide the all the work sites at once, so he would often show up to find misunderstandings and mistakes. Furthermore, visiting all those work sites every day left Steve feeling stressed out and frayed around the edges. Eventually, he trimmed down to just one team, working on one project at a time, and became much happier. Apparently, downsizing his operation didn’t hurt the bottom line: Steven the one-project-at-a-time “lean contractor” drives a Porsche 911.
As always, the best part of the evening came with the networking afterwards. Once the talk was over, Sanjiv sat down with me, Richard Cheng, and the gang from Code71 to talk about these topics more in depth. I strongly encourage all of you to consider attending the next APLN chapter meeting in Washington DC, or in your own neck of the woods.
