Self-Managed Waterfall?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Estimating   PMO  

I am sure there have been times in your career when you have had a conversation where you started to think, “This is a joke, right?” As the conversation continued, your thoughts maybe evolved into “This guy’s actually serious.” And just maybe by the time the conversation was done, you might have been thinking, “That could actually work…”

That was what was going through my head recently when I was talking with the head of a PMO. He had been trying to bring agile into his organization for quite some time, but the executive team was extremely conservative and felt as though the existing waterfall approach to projects was working well. The PMO head had demonstrated there were opportunities to improve further and had partnered with the CIO to recommend some projects that would provide opportunities to prototype agile, but the leadership team was still reluctant. In the end, they had agreed to a single concession—they were going to allow a couple of waterfall projects to be run with self-managed teams.

You can probably understand why I wondered whether it was a joke, and I have to be fair to the head of the PMO—he thought the idea was just as crazy when he first heard it. However, he accepted the challenge of trying to make it work on the condition that he be allowed to implement the concept in the way he saw fit. …

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