Tag Archives: programme management

Programme Management: Build capability, Roll it out, and Deliver Business Benefit

Agile Infrastructure

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A senior manager in the operations area of my organisation recently commented:

There is no such thing as agile infrastructure

That got me thinking. I can imagine that adopting an agile approach to infrastructure might be inappropriate in certain circumstances, for example military or medical domains.

On the other hand my current programme needed a completely new infrastructure stack and I found a considerable amount of agility was possible through that exercise. To my way of (probably simplistic) thinking any changes needed from the infrastructure are to provide either more capability or faster capability. With that in mind I’ve found it is possible to architect for agility and deliver the infrastructure in an incremental and iterative manner.
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Management on the Ground

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You have to keep your feet on the ground when others want to put you on a pedestal. After a while on a pedestal, you stop hearing the truth. It’s filtered by the henchmen, and they read you so well, they know what you want to hear. You end up as the queen bee in the hive, with no relationship with the worker bees.

Bill Burns, CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals
quoted in Goffee & Jones (2006), p. 43

One of my project managers recently mentioned that, despite being a programme manager, my own management style is quite "hands-on". In the sense of being on the ground with my team rather than in the technical sense although the two often come together. This approach has held me in good stead over the years.

Others, like Bill Burns quoted above, have realised dangers of being distant from the people doing the work and the corresponding benefits of being on the ground. I thought I’d take a quick look at some of these previous advocates of being on the ground:

  • Military Commanders on the ground
  • Management by Walking Around (MBWA)
  • Toyota, Lean and Genchi Genbutsu

I’ll wrap up by having a quick look at the Agile practices that help me be on the ground.
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Side Bets and Sweeties in Organisational Change

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People don’t resist organizational change! – People resist being changed!

The Communication Toolbox

My current programme is using new, bespoke software to drive organisational change. So I need people to change what they’re doing. A lot of people. As a first step I need them to adopt our new software. So I am always looking for ways to push the software roll out. In an earlier post I described one approach we use for encouraging adoption: Foot in the Door Technique. In this post I look at two other methods – which we call "Side bets" and "Sweeties".
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Reinforcing Success in Products and Projects

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A fundamental military axiom is to reinforce success.

Reinforcing success is a strategic concept used in many areas of decision making and management. Originally a military doctrine, the term is also used in theories related to parenting, business and other fields. It is essentially a selection criterion, or a prioritizing principle. A course of action is selected from various options on the basis of previous results of similar actions. The basic idea is: if it works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t, don’t invest more in something that’s failing.

Wikipedia: Reinforcing Success

I believe businesses should apply this principle to projects, products and product features. So not surprisingly I apply this as a guiding principle in my own work as an agile programme manager.
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Managers v Leaders: Are Managers Plodders and Leaders Cool?

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I consider myself a good manager and a passable leader. This should be okay but there is a certain anti-manager trend in the business world that is particularly prevalent in the Agile community. For example it has been common for Agilists to say "We don’t need no stinking managers " (Esther Derby: Rethinking Managers Relationship with Agile Teams).

It seems that leaders are somehow more cool than managers. Conventional wisdom says "Managers do things right; Leaders do the right things" (Buckingham & Coffman, 2001). And Jim Highsmith (2009), one of the Agile gurus, makes it clear that Leader = Agile and Manager = Non-Agile. Ouch.

Agile leaders lead teams, non-agile ones manage tasks.

Highsmith (2009) cited by Scrum Expert

All of which makes self-labelling as a "manager", particularly an "Agile manager", rather risky. But before I go off to find a job as a leader, for which I’m possibly under qualified, I thought I’d take a look at the differences between leaders and managers and assess whether common wisdom is, after all, very wise at all. To do that I’ll outline what a couple of other people say about managers and leaders and how that marries up with my own view.
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Foot in the Door Technique

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My four year old daughter is an master social psychologist, or just a natural manipulator. Here’s an example:

Daughter: Can I go over to Lilia’s house to play?

Dad: Sure

… some time latter …

Daughter: Can I stay for a sleep over?

Dad: Um, I guess so.

My daughter doesn’t know it but she is using what social psychologists call the "foot-in-the-door" technique (Brehm & Kassin, 1993). The same technique is applicable when rolling out new software.
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Putting all your eggs in one basket

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A common English phrase is:

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

English proverb

This is sensible advice and is really suggesting a risk mitigation strategy (see Risk Management). The proverb, fairly obviously, means don’t put all your resources (money, time, energy) into the same activity, just in case that activity fails. Or, put another way, avoid single points of failure. Or, to use another common phrase, keeping your options open.

This advice applies in many situations and at many levels. For example:

  • Royal succession
  • Personal investments
  • Infrastructure
  • Portfolio management
  • Programme or Project contingency
  • Technical design

The Royals apply this advice in their efforts to have an "heir and a spare" to ensure succession.
At a more mundane level a sensible share portfolio has diverse investments to reduce the risk of failure of any one.

As my main interest is programmes, portfolios and projects I’ll concentrate on the last examples.
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Change is Good for Agile Projects

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Kelley Hunsberger interviewed me for her article “Change is Good: For agile projects, redefining scope isn’t such a creepy thing”. It is great to see agile thinking in a mainstream project management magazine such as PM Network. And the article was a very nice little summary of why it is good to embrace change.

I took the opportunity to reiterate some of the points I’ve already made on Agile Project Scope and Agile Change Management, namely that all projects experience changing requirements and it is better to embrace this than fight it. For example legitimate sources of change include:

  • The customer learns as they see working functionality emerging of the development effort.
  • The technical team is also learning as they discover what works.
  • The environmental context might also dictate changes, such as changes in the market or legislation.

Ignoring any of these sources of “scope creep” would be foolish.
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Programme versus Project Risks

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Today a new project manager, somebody running one of my work streams, asked to put her risks on my programme risk and issues log. She didn’t really want to but apparently she’d been told to do this by her organisational masters outside the programme. I told her not to. Why? Because I use the log for the programme not the sub-projects. Since I had to explain my thinking to people in the company I thought it warranted a blog entry.
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Build it in a Week

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I ran a massed prototyping exercise with my current team. The whole team: development, user experience and design, testing, product management, business analysis, programme/project management and the programme director. It was a concerted effort to get a solution covering everything. The idea was to build wide not deep. The requirements for the end to end workflow was a generic operating model we’d developed previously. Microsoft Sharepoint was the underlying platform so this exercise concentrated on “out-of-the-box” solutions based on Sharepoint.

Expected Benefits

I allocated a week for this so the cost was quite high. On the other hand I expected considerable benefits. I expected “Build it in a Week” to enable us to:

  • understand the requirements more
  • validate the generic operating model
  • validate the emerging information architecture
  • identify technical challenges and identify if “tricky” things were in fact simple
  • demo an end to end solution (even if clunky and with caveats)
  • understand Sharepoint 2010 more, specifically understand what “out-of-the-box” means in 2010
  • identify what we can’t do “out-of-the-box” right now
  • understand each other more

As programme manager I thought it worth the cost.
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