Project Management Second Wednesday - 2010 Archive

Second Wednesdays - Agile and Lean Management Discussions over Breakfast - 2010 Archive

Backgound

The IndigoBlue Second Wednesdays are monthly breakfast discussions between Senior Business and IT Stakeholders in complex organisations. By invitation only and limited to 10 guests, the discussions are open and candid.

Format:

• Facilitated discussion / Breakfast briefing
• Starts at 08:00am, ending at 10:00am
• Hosted at Home House, 20 Portman Square, W1H 6LW

If you are interested in attending one of our Second Wednesday meetings or if you would like IndigoBlue to facilitate similar discussions within your organisation, please register your interest with Alban James:

Register Your Interest

2010 Topics:

• Tying Enterprise Architecture and Agile or the Emerging Role of the Business Architect
• Critical Success Factors for Complex Business Change Programmes | Blog Post
• Are we witnessing the decline of the project as a concept?
• Measure for Measure. Measuring what and for what? | Blog Post
• Creating a Culture for Business Transformation
• Matrix Management for Scaling Agile
• The Agile Treadmill, Command-and-Control in disguise?
• Potential and Limits of Managing IT as an Investment Portfolio
• Agile offshoring, the best or the worse of both worlds?
• Alignment of PMO goals and Enterprise Architecture vision (SOA)

Enterprise Architecture is fundamentally about Business Agility, but Enterprise Architects need to get better at architecting agile capabilities for organisations. As the approach to Enterprise Architecture matures in an organisation, from a technology focus to a business focus, Enterprise Architects will focus more on the organisational change, the target operating model, the business process, and the cultural change, as well as the technology change. This can already be seen in the growth of Business Architecture as an emergent discipline, but how will the role of the Enterprise Architect evolve to better support continuous change?

Facilitator: Steve Bacall

Critical Success Factors often play too little significance in guiding risk management and in prioritization during the life of complex programmes. Sponsors and Key Stakeholders can lose sight of them with either a traditional waterfall or a pure Agile approach. Critical Success Factors are core to successful large scale programmes of work with multiple stakeholders and multiple development teams. They are a focal point for the incremental development and delivery process, thereby supporting enforcement of corporate values over parochialism and reinforcing senior management perception of success.

Facilitator: Nigel Kneill

See also: Critical success factors in complex projects from Nik Silver's blog

Transient entities within a permanent organisation, the project teams are focused on getting the job done. Enterprise Functions such as Finance favor this model as it enables the economy of scale of Global PMOs. The rational for this seems hard to challenge, but in fast changing environments, is there anything as clear-cut as an end in products lifecycle? Groups organised around the concept of product are more innovative and responsive to change through client intimacy, team dynamics and knowledge retention. However, this constrains the flow of resources across the enterprise. Which combination of organisational models can enable the best of both worlds?

Facilitator: James Yoxall

Agile with a big 'A' seems constantly at odds with the notion of measurement. Whilst arguably, excessive management scrutiny shatters morale and motivation, is trust between peers always a suitable substitute for accountability? Or rather, is it the notions of control and governance which are too often seen from conflicting spectrum? Measuring activities or measuring outcome, surely, should be the question, but is this always so simple?

Facilitator: Jason Smith

See also: Measuring Success? blog post

The capability for complex organisations to constantly re-invent themselves seems constrained by cultural elements such as behaviors, semantics or beliefs, and a reflection of those in their organizational and governance set-up. Can culture be purposely influenced to make large organisations more agile, or is it merely an emerging by-product of innovative ways of working together within projects and programmes? Why bother about Culture?

Facilitator: Alban James

Agile has demonstrated its effectiveness at a micro level, at times with little constraints from the broader corporate environment. However, its principles of incremental delivery and early ROI are equally attractive at a macro level, for large programmes comprised of many interdependent projects, involving distributed teams and/or legacy environments. At such a scale though, sound business decision making involves managing a more complex set of constraints, challenging Agile in its purest form. What organizational models can allow Agile to flourish whilst satisfying the concerns of Enterprise Stakeholders from Risk, Compliance or Architecture as well as meeting corporate goals and value

Facilitator: Nigel Kneill

Agile comes with tons of literature on how to organise work at a very detailed level. How much of this treadmill is activity for activity's sake, rituals, and religious manifestations of an 'Agile Sub-Culture' aimed at integrating a growing workforce? Can this relentless 'heart beat' and this esoteric jargon stifle innovation and alienate the very people Agile purports to help? Could more slack benefit a discipline which ultimately relies on people's intelligence and creativity?

Facilitator: Nik Silver

Most agree that predicting and measuring ROI for IT is complex. Can IT Projects be screened under financial analysis tools like NPV (Net Present Value)? The idea is attractive; but is it really that simple? Assuming this can work entails looking at IT in isolation of the business context within which it aims at delivering value. Most IT Projects though, have multi-leveled, knock-on effects—within and beyond IT—which may prove hard to pin down in numbers. Taking an end-to-end view of business projects (within which IT is one element amongst others), and using a portfolio of values (of which NPV is one element amongst others) might be a more constructive way forward. Are sound IT Investments ultimately more about educated guesses than cold analysis?

Facilitator: Rob Smith

At first glance, Agile and Offshoring conflict on most points. In its purest form, Agile capitalizes on strongly tied, co-located teams and client intimacy to produce high quality, fit for purpose software. Offshoring takes advantage of a globally distributed, cost effective and flexible knowledge workforce. Can (if at all) Agile principles of incremental delivery and management of uncertainties be applied in an offshoring context? How well can co-location be simulated to 'make agile work' in geographically distributed teams with tools such as video-conferencing, wickies, Social Software, etc? What contract and project management models are appropriate for engaging with third party delivery partners in an agile offshoring context?

Facilitator: John Wright

In complex organisations, Project Teams and the EA function often find themselves at loggerheads. Different cultures, different semantics, different time boxes, different everything! How can principles borrowed from Agile (incremental strategy, business to IT collaboration), and Lean (pull model, self-organizing teams) ease the pain and what Governance model can accommodate apparently diverging agendas?

Facilitator: James Yoxall

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