Agile and Lean Program Management: Collaborating Across the Organization

Workshop Objective: If you’re managing multiple concurrent projects or a series of releases, you’re managing programs. This workshop will help you learn multiple approaches to uniting your projects or keeping your series of releases on track using agile approaches.

Workshop Overview: Program managers make the strategic decisions across the organization for the good of the total product. While program managers might look like they perform similar tasks as the project manager, they take a holistic product and organization perspective.

While agile approaches work very well for projects, it can be more difficult to make them work for a program. We will experience how to make an agile approach to program management work for you. We will discuss and use examples for managing a program throughout its duration and team building and meetings. We will address the particular issues for all levels of planning. This workshop is experiential in nature, so you can practice with the tools and techniques.

Target Audience: Software or Hardware Engineering/R&D/IT Managers of all levels, Project leaders for software or software/hardware projects, individual Contributors.

Prerequisites: Some prior program management helpful. Some prior agile experience where you release a product helpful. If not, we should add an extra day or so and discuss your needs in more depth.

This workshop is based on Johanna’s upcoming book, Agile and Lean Program Management: Collaborating Across the Organization. Consider conducting this workshop in concert with Deliver! Collaborating Across the Organization as a Member of a an Agile Program Team for the core program team.

Workshop Duration: 2 days.

Workshop Outline

1. 1. Introduction
   1. Workshop purpose and expectations
   2. A little about how agile changes everything
   3. Program management definition: scope, teams
2. Define the program context
   1. Create a program charter
   2. Defining a program vision
   3. How the vision brings the projects together
   4. Program acceptance criteria
   5. Activity
3. Create a program team
   1. How to get the people at the right level on the program team
   2. Prerequisites for influence
   3. Build rapport
   4. Common traps?
   5. Who did you forget?
   6. Activity
4. Working across the organization
   1. Communication and geographically distributed teams
   2. What kind of team do you have?
   3. Trust, congruence, culture
   4. Creating collaborative program teams
   5. Helping people deliver
   6. Creating a rhythm for your program teams
   7. Organizing the program team’s work
   8. Managing program team risks
   9. Delegation checklist for program managers
   10. Activity
5. Managing program and project managers
   1. Feedback
   2. Decisions that affect program risk
   3. Rolling wave planning and iterations
   4. Agile roadmaps
   5. Progress against release criteria
   6. Keeping people inside and outside the program informed
   7. Activity
6. Technical program management
   1. Software program management and the too-many-hat problem
   2. Agile program iterations
   3. When to use kanban
   4. How to use architects
   5. What happens when some teams are not really agile
   6. What happens when some teams use backlogs and some use kanban
   7. When this is your first agile project or you are very new to agile
   8. Landing zones help you meet release criteria
   9. Practice!
   10. Activity
7. Measurements, Dashboards, and How to show program progress
   1. Defining what you need
   2. Creating a program dashboard
   3. Activity
8. Managing the end of the program
   1. Ending a release
   2. Transitioning to another program manager
9. Summary and wrap-up

Contact me for the extended description.