Throw-Away - But Recycle! How Scrum affects the PMO
Especially in large development organizations, agile practices and processes are often introduced bottom-up where they create pockets of agility. While these pockets exchange agile techniques and practices they also spread out into other units. The network of these pockets creates a sense of unity and camaraderie among the agile workforce. After reaching a critical mass, this agile spirit is extremely infectious and will sooner or later target other units within the organization as well, for example the Project Management Office (PMO).
Due to a variety of reasons many PMO’s have been pushed into dead-end corners. In its role, the PMO is commonly in charge of “rolling-out” processes in the organization; many of them waterfall. Also, the PMO is responsible for monitoring the progress of these active projects at milestones, similar to a process police. Without the proper involvement and participation, this progress and milestones are unfortunately often misinterpreted when agile projects come into the game.
A better definition of a PMO would be an office which will influence the entire organization with better project management practices harvested and re-communicated. This PMO would staff a pool of ambassadors who play an active part in one project and become a change agent in another project.
During this session we will look at the role of the PMO in an organization which executes partially or exclusively agile projects. That will require a new fresh look at trust and servant leadership from the PMO’s point of few. Just like the title of this proposal, we will need to recycle the existing functions and responsibilities and make something amazing new out of it.
To demonstrate the impact of agility on “non-developing” parts of the organization, we will use Scrum as an example. The terminology and territory of this process is widely known which will make it easy to build analogies to the new the role of the PMO.
This presentation is planned as a 30 minute tutorial segment, a mix between lecture and experience report. The session could be extended to 90 minutes if the review team thinks it could attract more common interest among the conference attendees. I have selected “tutorial” for the 30 minute proposal, but If extended to 90 minutes the majority of time would fall into the “experience report” category. The additional time would be used for a more in-depth experience report how agile practices had been pitched towards a PMO in a large financial institution. That experience report will include an assessment of the successes and failures and an outlook. The presentation will peak towards the end of the presentation where we will try to derive an answer for the pressing question, “Will there be a PMO in an agile organization?”