Through several senior leadership roles, I have lead and supported the adoption of agile and scaled agile practices across PMOs, development organization, and enterprises. This includes influencing business leadership and shaping the enterprise conversation on agile adoption, scaled agile maturity, and the shift toward a product orientation while evolving roles and responsibilities to facilitate change, reinforce target behaviors, and support the agile transformation journey.
Project Management in an Agile Environment
The adoption of agile and scaled agile practices re-shapes the role of project management. Rather than directly leading detailed development tasks, Project Managers facilitate the delivery of business outcomes by navigating enterprise processes and orchestrating across teams. Project management practices organize the overall execution roadmap creating the operational and financial discipline and structure to ensure stakeholder engagement, define roles and responsibilities, manage risks and issues, and create the full transparency for project governance and oversight.
Additionally, the agile transformation journey often creates new opportunities for project managers who often shift focus and take on new functions such as Product Owner (PO) roles to maximize the value delivered by ensuring that the team backlog is aligned with customer and stakeholder needs or Release Train Engineer (RTE) roles to drive the delivery of business value through scaled agile release train (ART) events and processes.
Enterprise Agile Transformation
Any successful agile journey must include executive support and changes to enterprise practices and behaviors outside of the development space. While many agile transformation efforts start with adoption of an agile development methodology in the technology organization, true business agility must include changes to planning, funding, and executing work that extends beyond IT.
Adoption of product management lifecycles and a product anchored mindset, agile and scaled agile planning practices, product and team oriented funding principles, and adoption of iterative planning and execution processes involve change and adoption across all nearly all parts of the company.
Key changes I have implemented and supported on the agile transformation journey include the following -
Agile Practices
Scrum and Kanban agile development practices
Agile Ceremonies (PI planning, sprint planning, retrospectives, etc.)
Roles and Responsibilities (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer, Portfolio Manager, Program Manager, Project Manager, etc.)
Product Orientation
Product Management and Product Owner role maturity
A focus on business value, outcomes, and OKRs
Benefits realization processes
Scaled Agile Framework
SAFe (Essential, Large Solution, and Portfolio) influenced scaled agile planning
Introduction of Agile Release Trains (ARTs) the Release Train Engineer (RTE) role
Enterprise Adoption
Maturing annual planning and portfolio management processes
Redefining the role of project management and the PMO in an agile enterprise
Influencing Finance and Accounting Practices including capitalization
Supporting the shift from project funding to persistent funding for teams in a capacity model
Tool implementations including Atlassian Marketplace tools, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira, Jira Align, Clarity, and Rally
Organizational Change Management to support adoption and reinforcement
