Agile Program Management: Possible or a Pipe Dream?

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Quality   Risk Management   Testing/Test Management  

Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams? That’s because you were working on a program, not a project.

Program management is the art of coordinating several sub-projects to a common objective. Until the parts are assembled into the whole, the parts--while useful--have no business value to the organization. The whole program delivers business value to the organization.

Agile approaches help manage risk for projects. Is it even possible to scale agile approaches to programs? Yes, and it’s not trivial. There are four areas to consider when scaling agile to programs: backlog management, product architecture, managing risks across the program and explaining program state.

Manage the Backlogs
If you’re lucky, you have a product where the subprojects or subsystems are relatively independent. For example, consider a cell phone system. You can imagine that the call handling subsystem is independent from the voicemail, which is independent from the camera and so on. The applications on a cell phone are just that--applications. They have some defined interfaces, but the project teams can work …

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