Leading Agile Initiatives: How Leaders Help Agile Change Succeed

An agile initiative is not mainly a one-time rollout of Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Jira, new job titles, or a different meeting calendar.

An agile initiative is not mainly a one-time rollout of Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Jira, new job titles, or a different meeting calendar.

In context

• Topic: Proyectos, PMO y Riesgos — Gestión de proyectos, oficinas de proyecto y riesgo del portafolio.
• Source: Mountain Goat Software

Continue reading at the original source →

Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.

Why it matters

A project management office is worth the decisions it makes possible, not the reports it produces. Once the PMO becomes the function chasing status updates, it has already lost: the team learns to fill in the template and the real information goes back to travelling through the corridors.

My filter is the quality of the status report. If every project is green, the reporting system is not working: in any real portfolio some initiatives are in trouble, and a healthy organisation surfaces them in time rather than discovering them at the closure committee.

What usually goes wrong

What I see fail most is the absent sponsor. They sign the kick-off, appear in the photo, and do not come back until there is a problem. Without somebody with real authority clearing obstacles every fortnight, the project manager ends up negotiating as an equal with areas that do not report to them, and loses.

What to watch

• Who the sponsor is and how often they actually show up — not on the org chart, in the calendar.
• Whether the status report shows any red projects: an all-green portfolio is a portfolio without information.
• Which risks are identified, who owns each one, and when they were last reviewed.

How I read this entry

If this landed on my desk, the first thing I would ask for is not percentage complete: it is the list of pending decisions with a name and a date. A percentage can be dressed up; a decision stuck for three weeks with an identified owner cannot be argued with, and it explains the delay far better.

This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.