Structure of your Organization - Looking for Ideas
Lorelie KaidIT Program Manager| Fisher Investments
I head up our Enterprise Project Services organization that reports into the CFO. Within my team are the Project Managers, Analysts and Scrum Masters. I am looking at how to effeciently structure my organization to provide my folks the best support.
I am working on promoting my Manager of PMs to a Director, PMO role to allow her to take over the strategic planning and tactical direction of the PMO. She will have the PMs and the one Analyst report to her. Her role will have her responsible for all of the Enterprise efforts (M-XL projects - about 15 at any point in time), the organizational Output Process, and organizational metrics on project efforts). If you can share, I would also welcome how your organization is structured.
We began transitioning to Agile two years ago and at the moment, we have four teams, each with a scrum master. The scrum masters report to me. How have you structured the agile side of the house? Do the scrum masters report into one person? Do the Product Owners? What does leadership look like? Just trying to explore so that I can take advantage of any best practices.
Thank you, in advance. Just looking for options. Saving Changes...
A PMO's structure should align or support how the services it provides are delivered. Too often, we structure organization's one way and deliver value in a different way (thanks to Al Shalloway for this lightbulb moment for me!).
When dealing with agile roles, if you take a product centric role, the PO, SM and contributors would all report to someone responsible for the product or service produced by the team. Knowledge sharing could then be accomplished by setting up a Community of Practice for POs and a separate one for SMs, both of which are independent of the formal reporting relationships.
If you take a project-centric approach, POs would still normally report into product leadership for their individual products or services but SMs might be centralized into a Centre of Excellence or other sort of resource pool. However, by doing so, the organization structure is siloed whereas the work delivered is cross-functional...
Financial Management Specialist | US Peace CorpsYaounde, Centre, Cameroon
Nov 04, 2020 4:28 PM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
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Lorelie -
A PMO's structure should align or support how the services it provides are delivered. Too often, we structure organization's one way and deliver value in a different way (thanks to Al Shalloway for this lightbulb moment for me!).
When dealing with agile roles, if you take a product centric role, the PO, SM and contributors would all report to someone responsible for the product or service produced by the team. Knowledge sharing could then be accomplished by setting up a Community of Practice for POs and a separate one for SMs, both of which are independent of the formal reporting relationships.
If you take a project-centric approach, POs would still normally report into product leadership for their individual products or services but SMs might be centralized into a Centre of Excellence or other sort of resource pool. However, by doing so, the organization structure is siloed whereas the work delivered is cross-functional...
Kiron
Thanks Kiron, This is way to tactical... Saving Changes...
(I unfortunately have nothing to contribute to this thread, but am interested in what the responses may be, hopefully some good discussion. Subscribed.) Saving Changes...
Lorelie KaidIT Program Manager| Fisher Investments
Thank you, Kiron. I am aligned with you. What is interesting is that I am in an industry that tends to follow what everyone else in the industry is doing and they have been late to the boat with regard to project management (the industry). We started our agile journey two years ago (and it is going well). We are continually asked, "what are other credit unions doing". Well, a lot are not doing it at all :-)
With project management, I am looking to promote my Manager of the PMO to a Director role and have her take over Strategy of the PMO and direction. I will then focus on our agile infrastructure for long term.
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1 reply by Kiron Bondale
Dec 01, 2020 4:50 PM
Kiron Bondale
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The good news of being "late to the dance" is the chance to learn from the mistakes made by others. However, when it comes to org structure, it should align with the desired services, objectives and culture of the organization so what works for one credit union may not necessarily work for another.
Thank you, Kiron. I am aligned with you. What is interesting is that I am in an industry that tends to follow what everyone else in the industry is doing and they have been late to the boat with regard to project management (the industry). We started our agile journey two years ago (and it is going well). We are continually asked, "what are other credit unions doing". Well, a lot are not doing it at all :-)
With project management, I am looking to promote my Manager of the PMO to a Director role and have her take over Strategy of the PMO and direction. I will then focus on our agile infrastructure for long term.
The good news of being "late to the dance" is the chance to learn from the mistakes made by others. However, when it comes to org structure, it should align with the desired services, objectives and culture of the organization so what works for one credit union may not necessarily work for another.
Kiron Saving Changes...
Troy EdelenBusiness Transformation Consultant | Solopreneur| Aspiri Consulting, Inc.San Francisco, Ca, United States
Agree with Kiron that 'form follows function' or in the Jay Galbraith Star Model start with Strategy then align Structure and so on for the remaining points of the star.
Tactically speaking, I've worked with a lot of banks that, like Credit Unions, tend to organize by customer groups; Consumer, Business/ Commercial, Wealth, and Shared Services. You could fall right in line with the organization's structure with dedicated/embedded teams. For a recent regional bank engagement, we had a small but growing team of PMs. We settled on aligning cross-LOB along functions (e.g., money out/lending, money in/deposits, other) to capitalize on the need for deep subject matter and unique systems/IT expertise. Not saying this is the best model, just an example of one of many ways to approach it. Saving Changes...
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