This year's theme at PMI's PMO Symposium was all about Benefits Management, a big change from last year where the talk was all about portfolio management. There were about 700-800 people in attendance over the three days - and the set up was the same as last year. Some opening keynote speeches - a learning excursion (I picked the hospital - fascinating when you compare it to the NHS and what we have here) - then sessions you could pick from across six different streams. Some of these streams were what they called Knowledge Hubs, small groups of people being facilitated in a discussion about a particular topic.
This year, Eileen Roden, PMO Flashmobber joined me - and we bumped into John McIntyre (Ticketmaster PMO Manager, who was presenting a couple of sessions) and Mr Portfolio, Craig Kilford.
So what did I take away from this year's PMO Symposium? Here are my top ten messages:
In October it was the annual Agile Business Conference in London and we asked PMO Flashmob regular Brenda Nombro to go along to the conference to find out more about what the PMO community could learn from the conference. Brenda will be creating a few articles on different presentations she attended.
Here's Brenda to tell you more.
The conference agenda was jammed packed and for every breakout session I could attend, you missed another three, however the first session that I attended on Day 1 was a bit of a no-brainer – How Much is Enough Governance when it Comes to an Agile PMO? from Jonathan Stout from AXA.
It was clearly a topic close to many hearts as the room quickly filled with many standing or sitting around the edges. The presentation wasn’t particularly well delivered and felt very clunky at times. I had hoped for some real practical examples of how the theory becomes practice, but this was lacking and I didn’t get any idea of specific context despite some anecdotal examples. Having said this, there were some points on which I can reflect.
Edinburgh in September, blue skies and a lovely autumn day and we headed to Standard Life on the Lothian Road, with a pretty amazing view!
We had about 40 PMO practitioners join us to listen to Jude Paterson talking about the Agile PMO. She shared some great insights into what forms an Agile PMO Centre of Excellence, the new roles that an Agile PMO should consider, the steps to transitioning the PMO into an entity that can support Agile projects as well as thinking about agility in the PMO.
The video presentation and the slideset are both available over in the Mini-Masterclasses section of the website.
In this article, PMO Flashmobber, Melissa Corkhill, based in Edinburgh shares her thoughts and insights from the night.
Back in June I went along to an event hosted by p3m global to talk about the latest PMO Conference (ended up making a webinar about that here). The evening was all about PMO - specifically about Agile PMO. Before the main evening event we had a roundtable discussion about Agile PMO too (more about the outcomes of that later in the post).
The main speaker for the evening was Chris Davies from DSDM Consortium and he was talking about a subject that I know many people within the PMO are interested in - what services or support does the PMO provide for their organisation's Agile projects? And specifically what needs to happen with governance?
First of all, let's just remind ourselves what governance actually means, I like a lot of Graham Oakes' work and this is lifted from one of his many presentations on governance available via Slideshare:
The PMO Mini-Masterclass on the The Agile PMO was all about learning about Agile and how the PMO can be structured to support Agile projects. The session was held at Standard Life in Edinburgh and was carried out by Jude Paterson, an Agile trainer and Programme Manager with previous experience within PMOs.
The full presentation
The aim of the session was:
What Agile means to PMO practitioners and the organisations they work in
What kind of Agile are we talking about?
What Agile approaches and techniques work well?
How and what you, the PMO can do to support Agile in your organisation.
It has been argued that there is no place for a PMO in an Agile environment where decision making is devolved, processes simplified and documentation de-emphasised.
Andrew argues that this is far from the truth. The right kind of PMO can, and should, be a powerful enabler of Agility whilst ensuring an appropriate level of governance.
They will explain how an Agile PMO differs from the traditional model including a real life example of where they made this a reality”.
Takeaways:
How an Agile PMO is different
What it can do to enable Agility
Real life examples
Over the past few years, Agile Development methods have transformed the way that software is designed and delivered. This clashes with the traditional waterfall method of project management and presents a challenge to the PMO as we knew it.
This presentation explores how IG Group transformed its PMO to support product-focused agile development whilst satisfying project-focussed business sponsors.
Takeaways:
Get an overview of a project lifecycle that works in tandem with Agile Scrum
Understand how Agile product ownership can be included in a PMO
See how product management can fit into an Agile PMO
The Video
At the end of February, Ticketmaster International hosted the latest PMO Mini-Masterclass on Agile PMO in Practice. With 40 PMO practitioners in the bar (yes they have a bar!), the evening kicked off with John McIntyre, Head of PMO at Ticketmaster organising and running the event in an Agile way. If you want to see the whole session, take a look at how you can do that here.
As each PMO Flashmobber arrived, they were asked what they wanted to get out of the event - creating a product backlog - which drove the agenda for the evening.
With the first half of the evening the PMO Flashmobbers wanted to understand more about the concepts of Agile and how they manifest themselves in a real example. They learnt about self-organising teams, sprints, interations, retrospectives and burn down charts.
In the second part of the evening - Sprint Two, the session was all about the "PMO supporting Agile". So what top tips did John share during this part of the evening? What does the PMO actually do when it is supporting Agile projects?
This week I headed over to Arsenal football ground for the Project Controls Expo. It's primarily aimed at people who work in the heavier project management industries like construction, manufacturing, utilities, oil & gas etc. As the name suggests it is all about project controls - planning, scheduling and the like.
I decided to pop in and see what the Expo would be like for PMO people (great if you're working in these industries and these types of roles). Whilst there I decided to listen to a presentation from Sellafield called 'Agile and Earned Value'. I initially thought, Sellafield and Agile?? Gawd this could easily be Mr Burns' Springfield Nuclear Power Plant if Agile is being used! Luckily they are just using Agile for some of their software related projects, not for reactor building!!
I wanted to include a few highlights here and some of the slides because I know some PMOs are becoming more actively engaged in supporting Agile projects in their organisation. The earned value aspect of Agile projects could be one way the PMO could monitor these projects.
Stephen Jones, Programme Lead at Sellafield and Chairman of the APM PMC SIG carried out the presentation, he has also written a whitepaper to support it.
Last month's PMOFlashmob was all about Agile PMOs - that's PMOs that support Agile projects (just to be clear!)
We were lucky in two respects - we had an excellent venue in the shape of the Institute of Education at 20 Bedford Way in the heart of Bloomsbury. This gave us the space and the ability to invite a guest speaker along.
And that's where we got lucky again with Jennifer Stapleton coming along to talk to us about Agile PMOs. Jennifer published the small handbook on this about 18 months ago and I've wanted to hear what she has to say about it for a while now. She didn't disappoint. Jennifer is one of the early adopters, a pioneer in terms of DSDM back in the early 1990s. She was the main creator of the Agile Project Management accreditation from APMG and today she's just about to launch a new publication, Agile Programme Management.
