Disciplined Agile Applied

Recently I've been asked by several people about what I believe is the future for PMOs.  My answer, of course, is that it depends.  It depends on what your current strategy is today, how forward thinking your leadership is, and what you believe your PMO's role should be in your organization.  

To better understand your current strategy and leader, considering the following questions:  

1. How effective is your existing PMO?  Is it adding real value to your organization? Is seen as doing so by your leadership?  Do you have measures to support these claims?
2. How adaptable is your existing PMO? Does your PMO have a track record of embracing new ways of working (WoW)?  How well does your PMO react to change?  How well did it react to the changes required to face the  COVID-19 crisis?
3. How respected is your PMO? Do the people your PMO is meant to be guiding want to work with your PMO or do they merely tolerate it? The support of these people will be crucial as your PMO evolves to meet new challenges.
4. Does your PMO focus on more than just projects? Projects are one type of endeavor your organization has going on. You very likely have long-lived product teams that are a critical aspect of your value streams, service teams that support people throughout your organization, and operational teams that focus on running your business, to name but a few.
5. Is your PMO outcome focused? Does the PMO focus on ensuring that your organization's endeavors provide real value to their stakeholders, or are you merely concerned with simplistic "on time, on budget" issues?
6. How flexible is your PMO? Is it able to support teams with different WoWs - agile, lean, hybrid, and serial - or does it insist teams follow a consistent, "predictable" process?

The current state of your PMO will be an important determinant of how it will choose to evolve and whether it will be able to evolve to meet the challenges of the VUCA world in which we all operate.  Potential futures for today's PMOs include:

1. Evolving into a lean governance body. Lean governance is an important aspect of PMI's Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit. The lean governance mindset is different, focusing on motivation rather than conformance, on enablement rather than inspection, on flow of value rather than delivery of artifacts.
2. Evolving into a value management office (VMO). Rather than delivery of successful projects, a VMO focuses on the successful (and often continuous) delivery of customer value. For individuals, this will necessitate a shift to focusing on value stream management rather than project management. Mark Lines and I recently wrote a foreword for the forthcoming book From PMO to VMO: Managing for Value Delivery by Sanjiv Augustine and others. I suspect this book will be a game changer for many PMOs.
3. Evolving into an adaptive PMO. Many PMOs will choose to get better at being PMOs.  They'll become more flexible, adaptable, outcome focused, and value focused. This will require project management professionals to learn critical continuous improvement skills, exactly the skills you gain via Disciplined Agile certifications.
4. Dissolution. Some PMOs may find that they are no longer needed, their primary responsibilities being automated via artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies and by other organizational groups taking over their remaining responsibilities.  A PMO may not be dissolved completely, at least not right away, but certainly can be reduced substantially.

Your PMO may choose to follow a combination of the strategies that I listed above, and in future blogs I'm going to explore each one in greater detail.  I believe that today's PMOs face an important turning point, one that has been coming for years but has now been brought forward by the pandemic, where they must choose a new path if they are to survive, and better yet thrive.  Which path is right for you?

I was recently part of a business agility webinar for PMI's MENA (Middle East and North Africa) chapters.  At the very end of the webinar we were asked a question that was along the lines of "How can you apply DA when you're unable to adopt new technologies?" which I answered quickly as we were out of time.  My answer was a bit harsh at the time, which I share below, and in hindsight I wish I'd had time to answer more thoroughly.  Hence this blog posting which presents a more thorough answer.

First, improvement doesn't always require new technology. Many of the techniques referenced by the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit are technology independent. For example, consider the Coordinate Activities process goal diagram of Figure 1. Many of the techniques are manual in nature, such as Agile Modeling sessions (OK, you require the "technologies" of whiteboards, markers, and sticky notes), architecture owner teams (a cross-team group of people), and release windows (scheduled times when it's possible to release/deploy something to your customers). On the other hand, some improvements may require new technologies. For example, the strategy of adopt collaborative tools to coordinate between locations explicitly requires the adoption of agile management tools such as Atlassian's Jira or Zoho's Sprints. The point is that your organization's potential inability to adopt new technologies doesn't completely prevent you from making improvements to your way of working (WoW). As always, it depends.

Figure 1. The Coordinate Activities process goal.

Second, it's not that you can't adopt new strategies, it's that organizationally you choose not to. Stop looking for excuses to not improve, to not do what needs to be done for your organization to survive in the new competitive landscape that you face. Really. You need to stop making excuses. Your competitors are finding ways to adopt new technologies and so can you. You need to start making some hard choices now. My recommendation is that choose to succeed, and then choose to do the hard work required to do so.

Third, if you can't respond and improve quickly in the age of COVID-19 you're not likely to survive. This was pretty much my answer in the webinar. If there are groups in your organization preventing you from making the improvements that you need to compete and better serve your customers then you need to remove those blockers now.  This may mean that you educate those people as to why you need to improve, help them find budget to support the changes, or even ask them to get out of your way. Yes, that final strategy may require leadership within your organization to rethink whether those people should still be employed by your organization - even if that includes some of them.

Fourth, helping your organization improve sounds like a great opportunity for your project management office (PMO).  Earlier in the webinar PMI's Srini Srinivasan had addressed the issue of what role PMOs have in an agile organization.  He understandably indicated that PMOs must offer real value and be seen doing so. If your organization is struggling to make the changes it needs to improve, that sounds like a pretty good opportunity for a PMO to add tangible value.

I can't tell you exactly what the "new normal," or perhaps more accurately the "new abnormal," will be in the COVID-19 and post COVID-19 environments. But I know that it will be much more competitive than what you've been used to up until now.  I also know that it will require you to be able to better sense and respond to the changes in your environment. The Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit can help you to do exactly this.