Monthly News from Mike Cohn and Mountain Goat Software

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 2 July 2012 I've been running into a lot of issues of project governance lately. Fortunately, Scrum can be combined quite successfully with different approaches to project governance.   By "governance" I'm referring to a level of project oversight that exists a level above the level of project management. After all these years, I'm as agile as can be, but that doesn't mean I don't see the need for project governance. The challenge is that a company's project governance and project management approaches need to be consistent.    For example, if Mountain Goat got big enough that someone could start, say a $2 million project without me noticing, we'd put in a governance model. It would be something like: I need to know about any project above a certain size. I'd want to see a one page description of the project that showed me the key benefits it would deliver (probably in the form of epic user stories), a guess at a budget and a guess at a number of sprints. Both of those last items would be given as ranges. I'd then expect something like a quarterly update. Within those quarters, the team would be free to manage the project as they saw fit--although I'd certainly hope they'd take some form of Scrum or agile approach!    Unfortunately, in many companies, we see an inconsistency between project governance and project management. The team is told, "You can be as agile as you want but only after you write this detailed and perfect requirements document." The two articles below provide some guidance on this topic. Regards, Mike Cohn The Art of Compromise: Scrum & Governance The concepts of agility and project governance are not fundamentally opposed. Each is an attempt to improve the finished product. Scrum strives to do this through close collaboration and the short inspect-and-adapt cycles of the timeboxed sprints. Project governance strives to do it by what we might call inspect-and-approve (or reject) checkpoints in which the product or project is compared to a set of desirable attributes. Continue Reading... The Role of the PMO in Scrum A project management office (PMO) that is engaged in and supportive of transitioning to Scrum can be a tremendous boon. Members of the PMO often view themselves as protectors and supporters of a practice, so a PMO can help implement and spread agile practices across the organization. However, when the PMO is not properly involved, it can be a source of resistance as it tries to defend the current process, rather than improve it. Continue Reading... Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Succeeding with Agile, Effective User Stories and Agile Estimating & Planning courses scheduled in Boulder, Copenhagen, Dallas, London, Orange County, Oslo, San Diego, and Silicon Valley.

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