Michael Nir - Has the PMO become the death star for an agile transformation?

Agile in the age of the Laggards – What’s left for us?

In the turning point of the software digital age where organizations face a Cambrian Extinction - the scientific application of flow, agile, lean, design thinking, lean startup, lean UX, and DevOps together with high performing teams is crucial to business survival.

However, the empire strikes back and traditional, Taylorism backed frozen middle led by the PMO (project/program management office) is countering with a vengeance.

While scrum masters, agile coaches, and lean-agile evangelists are struggling in the trenches and in board rooms; The laggards adopt military-style vernacular to make combat. They have MS project Gantt chart JIRA to throw off the assault and they don’t hesitate using it.

The rebels make futile attempts to stab with the Spotify way, LESS, and DADs to weaken the assault but to little avail. The responses they hear see taste and smell are always the same: “agile can’t work for this organization, you must flex it to our specific needs.”

Can the rebel opposition find the weak spot of the death star?

Is there another way?

• Let’s Explore together the essentials of successful lean agile and DevOps change initiatives – we’ll find surprising truths about what makes and breaks agile changes in organizations.
• Learn how to keep the approach simple - Digital transformation must be simple - Team agility without organizational cadence, flow and continuous focus on DevOps and technical excellence is a wasted effort;
• Identify the scaling patterns for your organization - Scaling agility can be SAFe but often isn’t because we’re not solving for the right business problem – scaling is about emergence of failures;
• Explain #Soakability for leading change - A Culture of change lead outside-in, fails to deliver results; Success hinges on soak-ability, daily improvement that’s truly continuous