A Fractional Agile Transformation Won’t Work

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  

I had two very different conversations this week that both spoke to the same underlying issue. The first conversation was with a finance manager who was having a very hard time tracking project expenditure. He was used to working with traditional projects where there were firm budgets in place, with detailed plans for how funds would be committed, as well as reporting on whether the actual spend was in line with expected spend and if not, why not.

The second conversation was with a PMO manager who was finding that she couldn’t apply her usual performance metrics to the initiatives under the PMO’s control. The organization was conducting more of their projects using agile approaches and their triple constraint-based metrics models weren’t always as appropriate. However, she was still tasked with the same governance and oversight requirements as before.

While the specifics of these situations are very different, they both speak to the same underlying problem, and it’s one that I see happening a lot. As organizations increasingly commit to agile transformations, in whatever form that means to them, they are faced with traditional processes, approaches and mindsets that no longer work effectively. But because those elements aren’t directly associated with the agile teams or work methods that are being introduced, the impact isn’t always considered.

At times this can become…

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