Respect Agile, Even if You Don’t Understand It

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   PMO   Strategy  

In the last couple of years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with organizations around the idea of strategic portfolio management (SPM). There are many elements to that, but for the purposes of this article I want to simply look at the improved visibility that it provides business leaders. SPM software solutions seek to integrate with an organization’s project and work management tools to provide a complete view of strategy delivery from the high-level plans to the most granular work item. And they can be very good at that.

As a result, many business leaders are getting more insight into project execution than they have in the past, particularly in the agile space. Many traditional PMO models struggle to incorporate information on agile initiatives because the metrics of those initiatives don’t align with the constraint-based metrics that PMOs are comfortable and familiar with.

Now, business leaders can see agile progress in a way that aligns better with the value metrics that define portfolio success—and can see how that work differs from traditional delivery methods.

Some clients have embraced this visibility while recognizing the importance of staying out of the more granular aspects of work delivery; others have needed to be coached to allow work teams to deliver in ways that they feel are most appropriate.

What has surprised me is…

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