By Linky van der Merwe
When I first transitioned to Agile, coming from a traditional project management background, I quickly realised that one of the keystones to become successful in Agile, would be to change my mindset. The mindset that needs to be adopted, is the Agile mindset, based on a set of key values and principles designed to better enable collaborative work and deliver continuous value through a “people-first” orientation. This means a huge move away from being very process driven and a focus on output (PMI’s PMBOK has 10 knowledge areas and 49 processes after all); to becoming more people focused and outcome driven. What a shift to make for any experienced professional project manager! Many project professionals rightfully ask how do they become credible Agile Project Leaders? This article aims to answer that question.
Read this article on the challenges and what it takes to be successful as Agile Project Managers.
Shift to Organisational Agility
For the past few years many organisations have been on a mission to improve their Organizational Agility, meaning their capability to quickly sense and adapt to external and internal changes to deliver relevant results in a productive and cost-effective manner. The need to become more agile, has been fast-tracked by the world-wide COVID epidemic.
According to the PMI Report: Achieving greater agility, 2017, companies will be successful if they build a culture of Agility. Culture is a critical enabler. It needs to be a culture of readiness that supports flexible processes and employee training in support of agile practices. Those who succeed gain considerable efficiencies.
The Report goes further to state that 88% of organisations with high agility realise significant benefits including more efficient and effective processes and higher customer and employee satisfaction. These organisations are more likely to align their projects with strategic objectives which is critical to benefits realisation and success.
The Role of Project Leaders and the PMO
In addition to executives to advocate agility, project leaders could become evangelists for greater agility. In organisations with high agility, it is noted that 77% have an agile PMO or agile working group who are leading Agile Transformation. Successful transformation commonly requires new approaches in fundamental areas of business. Those include budget cycles, hiring practices, procurement practices, and role delineation.
An agile oriented PMO has a customer-collaboration mindset. In many cases, this means the PMO operates as an internal consultant, tailoring project delivery approaches to accommodate resources, timelines, and overall business needs, even as they change. Based on a documented case study in the PMI report, of TD Bank, the PMO can continue to perform similar functions than before, like:
- Establishing standards
- Serving as the Centre of Excellence
- Educating the organization
- Training and building talent
To achieve the above there are practical ways for a PMO to support and lead an organisation’s agile transformation. The PMO leaders need to become subject matter experts in agile. Develop and/or acquire the expertise to help guide agile practitioners, develop training, and establish a community of practice that provides coaching services. They need to define the value proposition of agile and the PMO’s role in agile delivery. Help the organization define the agile target state and a roadmap to get there. Drive the change beginning with successes in project delivery and extending it beyond projects to business agility. Build the capacity by acquiring and/or retooling the workforce with the necessary agile skills, build a culture of agile within the project delivery organization, apply agile concepts to all projects regardless of delivery method.
The Agile Project Manager
Where does the Project Manager fit in and continue delivering value in the agile context? Project Managers need more than technical skills. To sense change they need to be well informed about an organization’s strategic objectives and how their projects align. They need to forge strong relationships with business owners who request projects as well as with the functions that support them (e.g., finance, legal, risk management, and HR). Those with leadership skills and strong business acumen, can lead strategic initiatives and play a role to ensure projects stay aligned with strategic goals. Agile Project Managers will help to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of how work gets done, including identifying unnecessary steps in work processes, as well as to share essential information broadly with all stakeholders.
The PMI Report: What’s next? Identifying new ways of working, Dom Price, a Futurist and Head of R&D at Atlassian is of the opinion that Project Managers will take on a more strategic role by managing for complexity, ambiguity, agility, and communication. As knowledge workers they will continue to learn and grow their strategic value. Project, Program and Portfolio Management will drive innovation and change by playing their role to enable the organisation to navigate change every day.
In a case study from AstraZeneca, they have evolved their PMO and Project Management capabilities by demonstrating the value of project management to build trust across the organisation, by:
- involving project managers to identify smart and efficient processes,
- improve ways of working,
- streamline key areas such as risk management, planning, and control.
Enterprise-wide agility really requires everyone to understand what agility means—that it’s the capability to quickly sense and adapt to external and internal changes to deliver relevant results in a productive and cost-effective manner. Everyone also needs to adopt agile practices. The PMI Report conclude how project leadership can facilitate and advocate organisational agility by supporting the following:
- Understand technical project management activities
- Remove impediments and streamline processes when working with other areas of the business, such as HR and finance
- Expose and communicate bottlenecks
- Align stakeholder needs
- Advocate for training in agile practices
How to be a credible Agile Project Leader
How do Project Managers become credible experts in Agile? To answer this question, I’m going to use guidance shared by Jo Ann Sweeney, a transformational change consultant based in the UK.
“To be viewed as a credible expert, you need to know the subject inside out, but expertise is not just about our knowledge on the topic. Substance does come first; close behind comes sincerity and passion.”
She explains that you don’t need to know everything about a topic. You need to be honest about the gaps in your knowledge, respect expertise in others and have a passion for your topic aligned with a passion for sharing. Credibility comes from three things:
- your confidence – how you view and present yourself
- your character – the innate qualities that make us unique based on your trustworthiness, respectfulness, responsibility, fairness, caring and social responsibility
- your capabilities – your knowledge, skills and aptitudes; the natural talents you’re born with and develop throughout your life when you interact with others as well as learning through academia, training, mentoring and coaching
What’s next
I would say that experienced project managers (often PMP’s) have confidence based on their past experiences and ability to lead projects. They are able to display character, based on upholding the ‘Code of Ethics’ and professional conduct expected of project professionals. And any gap in capability can be addressed by training and coaching. There are various good certifications to consider for Agile, see this article for more information.
In a Techrepublic.com article, Allen Barnard stated that tech-savvy project professionals with business skills are highly valued for their ability to understand and facilitate change. The trend is to solve problems by using a design-thinking perspective. This means you view challenges from different stakeholders’ point of view and generate ideas to address them with clients. To facilitate these types of problem-solving approaches, project managers will need to develop leadership and technical skills, as well as empathy to build the strong relationships that are required to support organizational change.
There is a massive contribution to be made while helping organisations to build their Agile culture. An Agile Project Leader can help with establishing standards, to educate, to train and to align stakeholder needs. Do use your strengths of improving processes and enabling teams towards high performance. In a world with so much change, Agile Project Leaders are ideally positioned to help executives to turn their ideas into reality.
Sources
- PMI report: Pulse of the Profession 2021 Beyond Agility
- What’s next? Identifying new ways of working, 2018
- Forbes.com: Agility, not efficiency, is the key to business success In 2021, by Sherry Suski. December, 2020.
- TechRepublic.com: Project managers playing larger role in organizational agility. February, 2020.
- PMI Thought Leadership Report – Achieving greater agility, the critical need for cross-functional support, 2017