Tag Archives: Kanban

The Enterprise and Getting Things Done

In April 2010, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull’s dramatic eruption caused an ash cloud that kept the travel industry in its vicious hands for several days. The closure of the european airspace resulted in 100,000 cancelled flights…

Seven years later, one morning in March, two meetings take place.

Meeting 1: Replanning of Enterprise Project X

Project X has been running for more than two years and has reached a serious state. The implementation involves 10+ teams and an external vendor. Not only are the budget, plans and scope dark red from a traditional PMO RAG status view, but energy and motivation are drained, teams are exhausted, and project management is lost. Continue reading →

Standard Products and Differentiators: Getting the Worst of Two Worlds

Time to retire the dinosaur system born in the seventies. How hard can it be with today’s technology? There are plenty of standard products out there that can do the job. And you get so much additional functionality instantly plus all the features planned in the beautiful product road map! Continue reading →

Applied Kanban Values: Transforming the PMO, Part 3

In part one I touched briefly on plans and forecasts. In this post about customer focus and flow for the PMO i come back to them.

Flow: don’t work in the system, work on the system

In our PMO we had plans covering about three to 15 months: there were high-level milestone plans, mid-level milestone plans and low-level detailed milestone plans.

Continue reading →

Applied Kanban Values: Transforming the PMO, part 2

Respect: put away the RACI

Have you ever produced a RACI document? Together with many other steering documents it forms a pillar for the PMO, and defines who is responsible, accountable, contributing or only informed for each and every step in a process. In a RACI meeting you would typically discuss whether the product owner should contribute in the UX work for his/her story or only be informed. Or maybe the PO is actually accountable even though the UX expert is obviously responsible?

Kanban should be like water, making its way through cracks.

Continue reading →

Applied Kanban Values: Transforming the PMO

An agile PMO is really a contradiction; the PMO is a conservative enterprise project-centered administrative function. Not the first association that comes to mind when someone says agile.  At the same time, in a large company the PMO can provide a lot of valuable support.

So, in my new role as PMO Lead I thought I could do things differently. But after six months I found myself stuck in vicious circles of reporting and planning further and further away from the real work. (Meanwhile the real work didn’t exactly go in the right direction either…)

This story is about how I transformed my PMO role and what a more agile PMO could be like. Continue reading →

The Agile PMO

Time for holiday and I started thinking about the past year. A lot has happened and I also learnt a lot so I felt like writing about it. A dear colleague suggested I start a blog, so why not?

I’m into “way of working” and especially how to manage when you have the conservative enterprise-program-expectations on one side and flow-driven product-development teams on the other. I like to believe that we are all customer- and value driven in the same company and it’s all about understanding and continuous improvement together.

So “The Agile PMO” is about the everyday challenges in this area.

I am also curious about different ways of working with process improvement on all levels.