Michel ThiryPhD, PMI Fellow, Managing Partner| Valense Ltd.Littlehampton, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Complex and turbulent situations require a cyclic and flexible approach that today is labelled “Agile”. The popularity of agile management has helped managers understand and accept the culture shifts necessary to manage programs. I will aim to explain how agile methods and program management share the same cultural paradigms.
Program management has evolved from the complexity created by a number of interrelated projects and multiple stakeholders involved; from the need to span from strategy to operations and from the ambiguity involved in constantly emergent decision-making. Agile methods were developed to deal with projects that could not be dealt with using traditional project management methodology. Projects that are complex, involving many unknowns in terms of design and the effect that results have on expected benefits cannot be managed using traditional project management methods.
In 2001 a group of thinkers of what was then called “lightweight methods” issued the “Agile Manifesto to tackle complex, fast-moving IT programming projects. This Manifesto states four basic ideas:
- Responding to change over following a plan - Working software (measurable results) over comprehensive documentation - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
These principles are shared by program management.
- Agile Management and Program Management are based on the concept of a series of mutually reinforcing decisions that form a coherent whole aimed at achieving expected benefits.
- Both program and agile management evolve in an iterative way and are constantly realigned, based on measured results, to ensure they deliver stakeholder value.
- Both put the emphasis on simple governance systems that require minimal bureaucracy and rely on regular decision meetings where all key stakeholders are present.
- Both put a great focus stakeholder engagement and team empowerment rather than formal top-down relationships.
In today’s context, there is a need to manage ambiguity and high uncertainty. Whereas the ambiguity of programs and the inability to precisely predict results was a major hurdle in its acceptance by top management, this has started to change with the rising popularity of agile principles and culture. It has convinced many managers that you can be both adaptive and predictive in a relatively organised way. Saving Changes...
Stéphane ParentSelf Employed / Semi-retired| Leader MakerPrince Edward Island, Canada
Aug 03, 2016 9:55 AM
Replying to Sergio Luis Conte
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Heehehehehehe, Thank you very much Stéphane. I spend my time here becasue I learn a lot from your comments and other people comments.I fully agree with you. Sorry for the next because is something I will write about my personal experience. When I teach, when I perform conferences, when I help organizations to implement agile I ever say this: agile will help you to survive and decide about what side you want to stay: reactive or proactive. That is what agile gives to organizations and as you say to personal life. And it is the same with project management for example. In fact, I planned my wedding using project management practices following PMI way.
I would love to hear what lessons learned you captured from that project, Sergio!
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1 reply by Sergio Luis Conte
Aug 03, 2016 3:47 PM
Sergio Luis Conte
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After 20 years married I am still collecting them....
Saving Changes...
Michel ThiryPhD, PMI Fellow, Managing Partner| Valense Ltd.Littlehampton, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Thank you all, I believe that we all agree that agile is an approach to the management of projects, programs or even organisations.
My initial point is that whereas you could do a project and do a projects without this agile approach, you cannot do so with a program. Not if you want to deliver benefits and value. Saving Changes...
Stéphane ParentSelf Employed / Semi-retired| Leader MakerPrince Edward Island, Canada
Perhaps Gartner's bimodal IT model applies to programs as well, Michel? Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Aug 03, 2016 11:00 AM
Replying to Stéphane Parent
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I would love to hear what lessons learned you captured from that project, Sergio!
After 20 years married I am still collecting them.... Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Michael: You can do the same from organizational strategy to program/portfolio/project practices and beyond. Mr. Rick Dove`s work show about that. Trying to put this in the field where you can validate what I wrote to decide about this you have to perform an activity that belongs to business analysis field: "enterprise analysis" (now named "needs assessment" or "strategy analysis" depending on the IIBA or the PMI). With that, you create a gap analysis and you will understand if your organization (or one business inside the organization) is ready to use an approach. On the other side, the type of solution you will create to achieve the strategic objective is a key point to decide. Saving Changes...
Lawrence CooperCreator, Lean-Agile Strategy| AdaptiveOrg Inc.Kanata, Ontario, Canada
People and organizations seek agility (the result). They get to agility by being adaptive (the behavior).
It is no longer, in my view, an either/or discussion as far as traditional versus adaptive approaches are concerned. The world we live in, both societal and organizational, is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (i.e. VUCA). This means that the problems we face are no longer discrete - they are sets of inter-related problems (also known as holistic messes).
Recall that adaptive practices came partially from recognizing the existence of complex adaptive systems. Holistic messes within complex adaptive systems cannot therefore be solved using the same frameworks, methods, practices or techniques (FMPT) that we used to solved discrete problems.
Portfolio and programme management still have roles to play (I would say their role is actually more important now than ever before. However, their focus, the FMPTs they use, and their embedded language needs to reflect the new reality of a VUCA world full of holistic messes.
We can't do what we always done in portfolio and programme management and expect a different result.
Predictive, if you feel it has a place, only relates to the shortest possible planning time horizon that is communicated to others, be it the next release or the next sprint. Otherwise we fail to embrace the concept of emergence and the adaptability that is implies of determining what to do next based on what we know so far which includes accounting for the things we know today that we did not know last week or last month. Saving Changes...
Michel ThiryPhD, PMI Fellow, Managing Partner| Valense Ltd.Littlehampton, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Lawrence, I totally agree with you. This is why, for more than 15 years now, I have promoted the concept of a cyclic life-cycle for programs, where the cycles are defined by the degree of predictability of outcomes. Before VUCA became the buzz word, I was talking about Turbulent, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Saving Changes...
Michel ThiryPhD, PMI Fellow, Managing Partner| Valense Ltd.Littlehampton, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Stéphane, the Gartner's bimodal IT model is simply a redesign of the Run-Transform organisational model. I don't agree that Mode 1 should be represented by a marathon runner and Mode 2 by a sprinter. Mode 1 is more like a 10,000m run and Mode 2 is more like a relay race. Programs would be more like Mode 2 and projects within the program like Mode 1, except for the sourcing and cyle time, which should be inverted.
Hope this helps, Saving Changes...
Lawrence CooperCreator, Lean-Agile Strategy| AdaptiveOrg Inc.Kanata, Ontario, Canada
Michel - TUCA VUCA! sounds like a university chant. :) Saving Changes...
Michel ThiryPhD, PMI Fellow, Managing Partner| Valense Ltd.Littlehampton, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Or a New Zealand HAKA. ;-)
I also did a presentation where I used High and Low Uncertainty vs. High and low Ambiguity, which gave HULA-LULA-LUHA and HUHA.
Maybe I should change jobs and go into composing South Pacific Islands War Songs. :-) Saving Changes...
