Summary: Play Now: Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam: PMP Exam prep : Andy Burns and Cornelius Fichtner Slow PMO? In today’s “right now” business environment, “hurry up and wait” annual planning cycles won’t do! To be fit for purpose, PMO processes deliver value faster than the competition—continuously, and certainly not just annually. Lean agility delivers this winning velocity! Here's a diet to help lean out an overweight PMO. Transforming the heritage PMO takes insight, empiricism, and experience. This interview with Andy Burns (LinkedIn Profile) was recorded at the encouraging Project Management Institute (PMI)® Global Conference 2018 in Los Angeles, California. The experience shared in this interview should inform those needing to deliver fast—before the competition! We compare and contrast the practices of the heritage PMO and the lean-agile PMO and illustrate a technique to tailor the PMO process. Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Andy Burns: Hello! This is Andy Burns and in this episode of The Project Management Podcast™, we are going on a diet. A diet to lean out and overweight PMO. Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to The Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com. I’m Cornelius Fichtner. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner: We are coming to you live from the encouraging 2018 PMI Global Conference in Los Angeles. And with me right now is Andy Burns. Hello, Andy! Andy Burns: Hello, Cornelius and thank you so much for doing such a great service you did for project managers. Cornelius Fichtner: Well, thank you for sitting here with me. Two years in a row! We did one last year, right? Andy Burns: I think so, I think so. Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah! Okay, so my question has to be: What are you going to present next year because we need to do an interview on that? Andy Burns: I’m doing more and more with portfolios and Lean and Agile so it will probably be there. Cornelius Fichtner: Alright! So your presentation is titled: Calorie Counting and the Lean-Agile PMO. Let me begin with somewhat of a challenging question, Lean-Agile PMO, those two things, Lean-Agile and PMO, they don’t seem to go together all too well in my head. Lean and Agile, that talks quick and fast and you know Lean and Agile, right? Whereas PMO, it’s like okay we are prescriptive. We have this methodology. You have to fill in these templates. It takes forever. Here’s a new rule and if you don’t do it our way, we’ll send an auditor. How do these two things mix together? Andy Burns: Well it’s very interesting because we found out that Agile itself doesn’t scale very well from small teams. We also found that PMO with their prescriptive nature are not very good at managing the flow of value through a business. And so there’s a school of thought, a group of people that has come together and said: Let’s Lean out the PMO. Let’s take some of this heavy-weight prescriptive documentation and process and let’s look at flow and let’s focus on getting business value to come out continuously. So we see an opportunity to have value come out immediately and compound like compounding interest in a bank account and we are incredibly encouraged by what we are seeing myself and several colleagues that are doing this for different companies. And so it is possible to take the traditional PMO and say: ‘Look at your practices and see if you can Lean them out. So I do have a bit of a recipe I’m going to share at the Congress on Monday and I’m incredibly excited to do that. Cornelius Fichtner: Right, and what are the qualities of a Lean-Agile PMO when you compare it to say a traditional PMO? Andy Burns: Well it really comes down to the definition of your work. If you think about our definition of a project, our traditional definition of a project, it’s a one-time endeavor to create a new service or a new product. And if you think about that, how can I
