Blogging from the PMO Symposium: Day One -- Play Ball!

November 3, 2019 | by Matt Crawford

PMO Symposium 2019 is off and running. 

I attended the session entitled “Leading the Agile Evolution: Let’s Play Ball,” led by Alison Bakken from Thomson Reuters.  Her thoughts on the key reason for implementing Agile was to help teams deliver more effectively and efficiently for customers.  She shared several key components and pitfalls for implementing Agile.

I found it striking that the first of her "Key Components" was "Adapt an Agile mindset," since that echoed the title and message of my colleagues' presentation at last month's PMI Global Conference. Her next three components were things that actually go into creating and sustaining that mindset:

• Effectively empower teams
• Reshape the Project Ecosystem
• Build a community of learning and practice

As Debbie Crawford pointed out in her blog about the "Mindset Over Method" presentation, it is pretty hard to change work culture without engaging in training. And, indeed, that is exactly what the stats about high-performing organizations show in our Adaptive Organization study.

Bakken also identified some of the pitfalls organizations face in implementing agile practices:

• Adapting practices over mindset
• Doing Agile rather than being Agile
• Placing outputs over outcomes

I think these three pitfalls are responsible for a lot of the bad press Agile implementations get. Agile is more of a cultural change than a process implementation; or rather, it is both, concurrently. In Bakken's presentation she described Agile in this way:

• Agile means being open to learning, thriving within and adapting to change, constant collaboration with others, feeling accountable for the whole, and customer focus
• The Agile leadership dynamic is: Give control and create leaders, take control and create followers
• When people say they’re being Agile and so they don’t have to plan, they’re mistaken.  Planning is very much Agile, but the planning is different; it’s a much more adjustable and changing plan.
• Agile uses different metrics; not so much on-time, on-budget, on-schedule; metrics are more like net promoter score and customer satisfaction
• Agile still benefits from governance.  Traditional governance focuses on rules and regulations to prevent bad things from happening; Agile governance is more focused on “guardrails” to encourage good things to happen.
• PMs and Scrum Masters should be different roles.  PMs should be more focused on strategic project oversight; Scrum Masters should be focused on the tactical day-to-day execution.

“Let’s play ball” was a play on the interactive learning that we did in the second half of the session; in brief, we played ping-pong in teams with "guardrails" rather than rules. Like most of this type of activity, combining physical movement with concept learning offered Aha! moments and underscored that Agile is less a set of tools than a way of being in the world of work.

Fascinating first day! Stay tuned for more. We'll be blogging each day from the Symposium, Sunday through Wednesday.

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