program selection system

Organizational change - for example, the introduction of Agile practices - is like an infection. At first, the infection is localized and the body politic ignores it. Eventually and inevitably, the body politic will take notice, as its expectations and habits are disturbed. At that time, it will marshall its immune system and seek out and destroy the infectious change. IT management’s & business’s immune system is its governance processes. Unless governance processes and expectations are properly aligned with new agile and lean processes, agile and lean change will fail.

As leaders in a large IT organization of a Fortune 250 company, we leveraged our agile project experiences to transform how IT manages its portfolios of projects. Along the way we ran headlong into inherent conflicts between agile and legacy corporate processes and mindsets. We recognized the need to transform those legacy processes and mindsets to effectively manage project investments in an agile manner. In this session we discuss the challenges we faced and the successes we realized with IT investment funding, change management, and governance.