Promote Many Opportunities

So, what should a PMO do for agile projects? Well the good news is it should perform exactly the same roles as it aims to provide for traditional projects, but applied to the game of agile projects.

1. Monitor and control project performance – track velocity, track team and sponsor satisfaction ratings, look for dangerous velocity trends, check backlog size, monitor iteration and release plans.

2. Develop and implement standard methodologies, processes, and tools – provide templates for user stories, test cases, cumulative flow diagrams, etc. Provide agile PM tools, educate supporting groups on iterative development concepts.

3. Develop the competency of project personnel, including training and mentoring – provide agile training courses, coaches, mentors, send people to local agile events.

4. Multiproject management, including program and portfolio management, coordination and allocation of resources between projects – coordinate between agile teams, communicate between projects outlining progress, issues, retrospective findings.

5. Strategic management, including participation in strategic planning and benefits management – identify projects with opportunities for early ROI or competitive advantage.

6. Organizational learning, including the management of lessons learned, audits, and monitoring of PMO performance – gather project velocity profiles, capture retrospective findings, include perceived PMO cost vs. value in project metrics.

7. Management of customer interfaces – provide product owner training, provide guidance on acceptance testing and how to evaluate and give feedback on systems. Champion the importance of SMEs to projects.

8. Recruit, select, and evaluate project managers – develop guidelines for interviewing agile project managers, get prospective PMs to comment of retrospective findings, ask about the drawbacks of agile to separate the “readers” from the “do-ers”.

9. Execute specialized tasks for project managers (e.g. preparation of schedulers) – train and provide retrospective facilitators, create agreements with agile project trouble shooters, provide mentors and coaches.

Your ability to align a PMO to agile project management factors will depend on a variety of factors; some within your control (your sales skills, reasoning, open mindedness, etc) and some outside your control (willingness of the PMO lead to listen, need for change, governing standards, etc). Yet a PMO need not Produce Multiple Obstacles or focus only on Problematic Management Observations, with a simple shift in viewpoint it can stay true to its objectives and Produce Many Opportunities to allow me as an agile PM to Promote My Objectives of successful projects.