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Webinar Attendees' Questions, Answered, Part 4: Agile, Transformation, Roles ... and the PMO

November 9, 2021 | by Sydni Neptune, PMP, CSM

Organizational change management is the key.

[Editor's Note: Continuing our series of responses to questions asked by our webinar attendees, please welcome our Agile SME Sydni Neptune to the fray! The recorded webinar can be viewed here.]

Q: What are the areas of work that can have the greatest impact to moving forward with agile transformation and improving maturity? Of course the answer is, it depends, but all things being equal, what areas have successful organizations focused to make significant, measurable, and valuable updates to the process of one’s PMO?

A:   A formal organizational change management effort to inform and manage the transformation to agile can have a tremendous impact.  This change effort should be driven top down from leadership. 

Other areas of impact include:

  • Benefits realization. Funded work needs to show alignment to organizational strategies and be regularly reviewed for progress against planned benefits.
  • Performance Measurement
  • A pilot program to showcase "live" the agile transformation journey and/or the outcomes of new behavior(s) 

Q: We are a PMO inside our IT department who also has teams using Agile. We struggle with roles and responsibilities between what the Product Owner (PO), Scrummaster and PM should do during the project process.  Is there a good guide that would help us understand what parts of the project we are responsible for delivering?

A:  Mapping the responsibilities of the traditional roles to the new roles is a great way to understand the transformational differences in roles as well as reveal in a more clear, concise way, the potential gaps in roles.   Each company needs to understand who is empowered to make decisions.  The PO should be one who is empowered to make decisions that could affect scope of the effort (project).  Some companies are able to make a complete transformation to support agile product development,  but many companies today do not relinquish or empower agile roles to support the “ideal” or textbox agile methodology / workflow.   The latter companies usually end up with a ‘hybrid’ project / product workflow where traditional decision making roles are still in place and development teams use agile to manage work.

For more insights into organizational transformation, download our new white paper, Establishing the Adaptive Organization, here.

About the Author

Sydni Neptune, PMP, CSM

Sydni Neptune is a Managing Consultant for PM Solutions/PM College with more than 20 years of business and IT experience in project and portfolio management and organizational change transformation in both traditional and modern Agile environments. Ms. Neptune’s real-world PMO experience and passion for project management help engage business professionals on topics such as:

  • the business value of the Project Management Office (PMO)
  • the synergy between good governance, resource management, portfolio management, performance measurement, and process improvement
  • how effective project and program management contribute to corporate strategy execution

As a highly accomplished and experienced consultant, Ms. Neptune also focuses on PPM training, development and delivery, motivation and teambuilding leadership, technical and transformation program/project management, and innovation and product development. Her diverse client experience has provided her the opportunity to work with organizations such as Resideo: Smart Home Products and Systems; Bridgewater; and the American Institute of Baking. Ms. Neptune specializes in finding innovative solutions to difficult business challenges while focusing on aligning deliverable results with business goals and objectives.

Ms. Neptune has been a speaker at PMI events and holds a bachelor’s degree from Hyles-Anderson College.

View Posts by Sydni Neptune, PMP, CSM

Sydni Neptune, PMP, CSM

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