(Or how a picture can divert 1,000 eyes)

This post was first written for ProjectManagement.com who were doing a series on Visual Project Management at the time. I was excited when I heard about the theme since I am a big fan of adding meaning through visual tools to all kinds of project elements, whether it is methodology scope, project progress, or risk lists.  As a visual thinker I like to make sense of a concept spatially before adding detail or explaining it to others. Yet I have found this to be a weakness as well as a strength, because what cannot easily be visualized can often get trivialized or forgotten.

Plans and prototypes are great because they easily bring people together to debate and collaborate on important project elements. Since we have something to point at and annotate; discussions and agreements progress quickly because consensus making is greatly facilitated. However what about conflict management, decision making across teams, or business engagement issues? These are more difficult to visualize but arguably more important than if a web site should have a blue or a green background.

The idiom of “Out of sight, out of mind” speaks to the dangers of an overreliance on visual management.  So how do we address this threat? I believe there are two main choices: first, find a way to somehow make it visible, or second, consciously bring extra attention to it.

Another project saying “What gets measured, gets managed” might hold a clue to helping find ways to make things more visible. I think there are some parallels between the visible / invisible issue to the measurable / immeasurable issue. Many of the things we can measure on a project are not helpful and many of things we would really like to measure are intangible and difficult to measure. Einstein summed it up nicely with the quote “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

Do any of these traditional PMO scenarios match your agile team experiences? Your traditional PMO is so laughably outdated that most agile projects ignoring them; other projects produce token deliverables to appease them, but these bear little resemblance to anything actually happening on the agile projects.

The PMO looks for conformance to BDUF (big design up front) methodologies with signoffs to premature speculations about requirements and scope definitions. It reports progress on traditional projects such as being 75% through Requirements Gathering or 50% through Analysis and Design as if these non-value delivering activities are actual progress. Finally, when projects have issues the PMO responds by creating more review and approval groups to ensure competence and adds gates and sign-offs to try and improve quality.

If these scenarios sound familiar to you I would like to ask a follow-on question: How is your agile roll out going? Is the PMO the last bastion of opposition or are you fighting pockets of resistance and misunderstanding throughout you organization? Is the once “no-brainer” decision to switch to agile actually causing some headaches and frustration? If you answered yes to this too, you are not alone.

It turns out the PMO is not usually the problem, but they are a good litmus or canary-in-the-coal-mine for how an agile transformation is going. The PMO’s focus is project execution process, so if you cannot convince this group that agile is the way to go, then how do you plan to convince groups who don’t care about process at all? How about the BA Center of Excellence or the Architecture group, have they fully bought in to your agile approach or are they requesting more formal practices?

Getting the PMO onboard is helpful in convincing these other, more problematic groups that agile methods can be a better way of working. So how do we do that? Well making agile more accessible is a good start. PMO’s often shy away from agile methods since the short iterations and repeating cycles of work do not offer the familiar phases and gates they are used to. In fact interacting with agile team iterations seems as appealing as putting your arm in a spinning concrete mixer.

However we can make the process less daunting by showing how the user story and backlog process works. Take some required deliverable, like a handover document, and create a story for it. Give it to the team and along with a customer proxy (a Product Owner for instance) the story will get prioritized and placed in the backlog. Since it is required for Go Live the story will get selected and worked on by the team prior to the release date – all with PMO limbs intact.

Another point of confusion around agile methods for some PMO groups is the lack of a visible end point or meaningful progress reporting. They may wonder if iterations just repeat until the customer is happy rather than the specification is complete? Gaining visibility into the process can help by providing retrospective data to the PMO along with story points and feature metrics. By explaining the cadence of reviews and tracking metrics PMOs are assured progress is measurable and all the old favorites like Budget At Completion (BAC) and Schedule Performance Indexes (SPI) can still be obtained.

Helping the PMO helps agile adoption by creating another advocate group. It may be a surprise to some PMs and teams but PMO’s are under a lot of pressure to justify their existence and demonstrate their value add. They are usually very receptive to ways to stay current and support emerging practices.

Investing some time to train them in Product Owner training or Retrospective Facilitation pays dividends since now they can offer these new project services. Project teams will benefit from a more educated and aligned business community and gain impartial facilitators making it easier for all to contribute ideas at retrospectives.

Rather than unaligned PMOs representing an obstacle to agile teams, they really represent missed opportunities for further agile adoption and an indicator that the agile message might be miscommunicated to other stakeholder groups. Spending some time to address their concerns, explain the risk reduction goals of early feedback, and equip them with useful services will pay dividends and ease the larger adoption of agile and lean principles.

(I first published this artice at ProjectManagement.com here)