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Institute an agile transition team, and have the agile PMO play a significant role on that team. If you are starting on the journey, establishing an agile transition team can be a critical factor in your success. The agile transition team plans and implements the strategy for the organization’s agile transition (using a backlog, iterations, planning meetings, retrospectives and, in general, responding to change) This group monitors and communicates results throughout the organization, and is responsible for removing organizational level impediments. The PMO representative can act as ScrumMaster for the agile transition team. Members should be leaders representing different departments and functions that are impacted by the agile transition. For example, having leaders from development, QA, product development and the PMO is an excellent practice.

Establish a “Meta Scrum” that is tasked with mapping projects and features to corporate strategy. As part of optimizing the whole, it is important for there to be a big picture view across products and features. In general, product managers are tasked with defining, prioritizing and communicating the vision and features for their products. When you have a program that encompasses multiple products with multiple product owners and project teams, keeping everything in line with the corporate vision can sometimes be overlooked.   Unlike the Scrum of Scrums--which is tactical, i.e. focused on execution--the Meta Scrum is focused on the strategic planning and decisions guiding the program or programs as a whole. Establishing a Meta Scrum with the PMO representative acting as ScrumMaster to plan and facilitate meetings (as well as reporting and tracking decisions and action items) can add significant value in having a program able to rapidly respond to change while staying true to the corporate strategy and objectives.

I like using story points to establish the velocity of individual teams. From a program point of view, however, story points are difficult to use across multiple teams. The nut there is that one team’s story point is not equivalent to another team’s story point. To crack that nut, I use agileEVM to “normalize” to standard project management metrics like the Cost Performance Index and the Schedule Performance Index, as well as the Estimate At Complete in integrated dollars. These metrics can be aggregated across teams to establish progress against the plan for the entire program.

The executive makes a “vendor” or external “coach” responsible for the transition If you have handled the first risk and have defined success and success metrics, you likely will not find a vendor who will base his payment on your metrics.  After all, the metrics likely call for less project failure rate, faster response times, etc.  You probably can’t measure these things in less than a year if you really want objective metrics and not one optimized for short-term results at the expense of the longer term.  A vendor might want: # of people trained % of teams using an “agile” project management tool # of teams with an embedded “agile champion” # of successful iterations It is really easy to accomplish the above metrics and still not make any material change in the organization.  I have worked with a client that did something similar to the above.  Most of the teams starting using some new Scrummy project management web application for project tracking.  They declared that monthly status meetings were now iterations.  They declared a member of the team to be the Scrummaster (and sent that person to training).  Overall, the same organizational problems persisted.  Vendors cannot produce real change in an organization unless the organizations executive leadership alters the culture in a meaningful way.

It is critical that everyone has the same understanding of, and commitment to, the desired outcome: a business that is reliable through predictable technology processes that deliver business agility. To do this, there needs to be a management commitment to develop a focused, on-going practice around the pursuit of organizational maturity. As part of this, gaps in skills and capabilities should be identified and positive action – training, coaching, process improvement and tools deployment – taken in order to close the gap

the work force needs to understand the business drivers for Agility. They need to be challenged to improve their quality, improve their cycle times, to improve the frequency of releases and the value they deliver to the customer. They need to know how these things fit within the bigger picture and why improvement is their responsibility.

To change a culture it's important to recognize that every knowledge worker makes decisions and takes actions that affect the performance of the business. The culture in the organization is the reflection of those decisions and actions.

Identify the technical leaders within projects; those that are “self-driven to produce quality results on time … combine technical ability with enough people skills …are trusted and respected by both their managers and fellow developers, are determined to make the team succeed, and usually live the work.” (Chief programmers, Chapter 2:  A Practical Guide to FDD).

Sell them the vision: if you cannot sell these people on the benefits to them, their colleagues and the organization of the new way of working then something is wrong

Provide in-depth training and on-going coaching. It is better to have a single lead person trained in-depth who can coach his teammates through the basics than to have the whole team trained on the basics with no-one on the team to turn to when the basics are not enough.

Part 2

The thinking is that IT is mission-critical, so let's not change things without giving it a lot of thought and a lot of consideration

The really hard part is around the people transformation - getting developers to work side-by-side with testers and users is a completely foreign concept.