During a recent “Ask Me Anything DA” Webinar, an experienced agile coach asked a great question that we often hear.
“As an Agile Coach, I have been working with a few teams within my organization using the DA toolkit. We’ve seen some great success with adoption, and now our enterprise PMO (legacy heavy waterfall) is interested in learning more about how we can use DA throughout the PMO. Where is a good place to start outside of starting with education on DA?”
What we have found over and over, when the discussion with Enterprise PMOs reaches the point of interest, it is important to prepare and have ideas/plans/strategies to open the discussions with and lead the PMO into increasingly more meaningful collaboration.
When asked, “How will we increase coverage/adoption of DA throughout the PMO?” be prepared to explain a high-level approach to a transformation. For example, this is a link to the Process Mentors Lean Change Approach to Disciplined Agile Transformation. Our approach is an evolution of aspects that Mark Lines and Scott Ambler created and wrote in the book An Executive’s Guide to Disciplined Agile: Winning the Race to Business Agility. One aspect of the evolved approach that has resonated well with PMOs is our just-in-time training. The PMI Disciplined Agile training is focused on setting a great foundation and how to choose your WoW (way of working) as a team. We’re focused on creating a path for how teams new to this WoW will put into action the practices they select, what I call the “Doing Your WoW.”
Another part of the strategy, one that becomes a critical aspect of increasing coverage and achieving meaningful success, is “what does good look like?” What will the PMO and your organization get out of moving further into adopting DA? Three categories we typically center on are Business Value & Outcomes, Mindset, and Process Adoption. We assign a weighting, with the highest weighting portion to the value and outcomes.
Be prepared as early as you can to discuss governance. This is or should be an important consideration for PMOs. Getting people to understand how a lean governance strategy works will benefit the organization and increase adoption versus being an impediment.
There are many other thoughts in this space to discuss, but an additional one worth mentioning is to have ideas ready to discuss around a communication strategy. It helps to bring this up early, as it shows that you are already thinking through how you will raise awareness of more adoption coverage, provide visibility into why the organization is shifting to a new agile way of working, what everyone will get out of it, what challenges are coming, etc.
In addition to holding more discussions with areas in your organization, such as the PMO, you should also initiate activities that will continue to provide transparency into what you are doing with the early adopter projects and generate interest in other parts of the organization that will further support all future discussions you may have.
Some ideas for you to consider include:
Agile Office Hours/Clinics
Begin holding agile and lean office hours/clinics with weekly or bi-monthly frequency. Keep clinics short – 30 minutes to start, identify a topic that will be interesting to draw people in, discuss the topic for 15-20 minutes, and allow plenty of time for questions and discussion.
Lean Coffee Sessions
Start a monthly Lean Coffee session that builds on your agile clinics. These sessions will have a structure but are agenda-less. Attendees of each meeting offer up topic ideas and everyone votes on which to select. Some sessions may have a topic that runs the entire time allotted. Other sessions may have a topic that ends of its own volition, and the next-highest-voted topic is also discussed. Lean Coffee sessions are an excellent source of “insights” into how people affected by a transformation feel about the changes they experience.
Agile/Lean Gameshow Virtual Happy Hour
Some great platforms create pub-style game show quiz competitions that are fun in-person and fit well with the virtual happy hours that are going on. This is a fun and friendly competitive activity that really helps get a buzz going.
Bring in a Guest Expert
Invite a guest expert to present a webinar/discussion for you. Inviting an outsider who is an industry-recognized expert helps to support what you are already doing.
Mini-Training
Provide short-duration (3-3.5 hours), high-level training designed to cover what DA is, what its key differentiators are, how previous experience with other agile frameworks such as Scrum is good, and how DA builds on these frameworks. This is also a good way to increase awareness and initial buy-in of DA before longer-duration training is looked to (such as the PMI DA training workshops).
I hope this helps. For additional information, please visit the Process Mentors website: www.processmentors.com or contact info@processmentors.com.
We help implement lean and agile methodologies to streamline processes in a context-sensitive manner.
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