Establishing the Agile PMO: Managing variability across Projects and Portfolios

Abstract

Our portfolio management office helps to balance the demand on the firm's resources from multiple competing and sometimes inter-dependent projects. Traditional project/portfolio management office supports the project/portfolio managers. As more and more of our project managers become scrum masters and the portfolio managers becomes the group scrum master, our portfolio management office needed to become agile itself. We converted our traditional PMO that supported the project managers to an agile PMO that staffed experienced agile coaches who supported the different portfolio and agile project teams. The services included conducting agile training, starting up new agile teams, encouraging team empowerment, transforming existing roles, artifacts and processes to become more agile, capturing metrics across portfolio and project teams and creating the management reports. We are sharing the lessons learned and hopeful that it will benefit those starting on the Agile adoption journey.