(2018-06-29) Cagan Revenge Of The Pmo Safe

Martin Cagan: Revenge of the PMO | Silicon Valley Product Group

The second, less obvious but in my view the most profound, is that Agile would empower a team to actually go figure out how to solve a problem (Agile Product Development)

The politics inside companies became clear with the second change.

Many stakeholders were not comfortable turning over responsibility to the product teams, especially when they had ill-equipped “product owners” that were more about the process and the backlog, and much less about the deep knowledge of customers, data, business and industry necessary to enable the team to effectively solve hard problems in ways that worked for the business.

But there was another faction in most companies that was decidedly not happy with Agile.

Most larger companies in the pre-Agile days had a fairly powerful organization called a “PMO”.

In some companies the PMO jobs were actually eliminated, but in others they were largely pushed aside

they have returned

notion of processes that focus on “Agile at Scale,”

I don’t personally know of a single leading tech product company that is using SAFe.

All the examples I have found are big IT, project-mindset organizations – big banks and insurance companies – not technology-powered product-mindset companies – so not the type of company that I would normally work with.

The core benefits of Agile and Lean are lost. More accurately, if you follow their process, I find it inconceivable that you’ll be able to achieve the underlying benefits of innovation that can come from effective use of Agile and Lean methods.

if you were an old-school PMO missing your classic portfolio, program and project management, you would probably love it

The bottom line is that SAFe is very much a top-down, mercenary model; the role of design and especially engineering is not nearly as strong as it needs to be; it’s all about output and not outcome; and the real consequence is the obstacles to continuous innovation

just about every large pre-Internet company out there today has some sort of “digital transformation initiative,” but what most of them don’t realize is that the heart of this transformation is moving from project-mindset to product-mindset.

The rise of these sorts of processes makes clear to me that large portions of the broader industry still don’t understand the difference between project-mindset and product-mindset, and so they don’t see the real value in Agile or Lean, or have such a superficial understanding that they’re easily swayed.