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...
