Daniel Wakeman

IT Group Executive @ FIS Global

& Former CIO @ ETS

The PMO & DevOps, a Recipe for Business Growth in

a Digital World

PMINJ Chapter

Symposium - 06 May 2019

PRESENTATION SUMMARY & OUTLINE

Presentation Outline

Business Growth: The imperative for change.

The Agile Organization

DevOps Overview.

Is there a PM on a DevOps team?

The Challenge of Widespread Agile/DevOps Adoption

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

The new Opportunities for the PM.

Essential skills of the DevOps PM.

The new tools of PM’s must learn and adopt.

The Future of the PMO

Conclusion.

Q&A.

Companies of all sizes are desperate for growth and are

seeking ways to accelerate innovation and take

advantage of digital business models. Speed and agility

are no longer a desire by company leaders – it’s an

imperative for survival. While the benefit of Agile &

DevOps is great, developing a culture where the

development and operations functions work together to

create innovative capabilities at a faster pace is

challenging. The PMO, which is uniquely skilled in

managing complex change can take the lead and ensure

that those that do decide to take the DevOps journey are

successful.

May 6, 2019 2

BUSINESS GROWTH: THE IMPERATIVE FOR CHANGE

Forbes reports that

Technology incorporation is the biggest challenges business face today

...we are developing new technologies at an accelerated rate without being able to fully incorporate them into existing products.

Finding the Right Talent to Innovate is Difficult

Talent is the main driver of execution and innovation.

Digital Transformation Of Enterprise-Level Companies is Accelerating

New concepts, discoveries, patents, gadgets and groundbreaking ideas are shaping our future.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/12/27/13-tech-experts-predict-the-industrys-biggest-challenges-in-2019/#9bc7ee51bcd1

May 6, 2019 3

THE NUMBER OF

NEW GAME

CHANGING

TECHNOLOGIES

IS SIGNIFICANT

How can companies

adapt quickly to remain

relevant?

May 6, 2019 4

THE AGILE

ORGANIZATION

McKinsey suggest to deal with

the need for speed and

responsiveness that companies

adopt the behaviors of start up

companies.

This is a significant change to

the how a company’s operating

model.

What is the role of the PMO

and the Project Manager in this

new operating model?

Source https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/an-operating-model-for-company-wide-agile-development

May 6, 2019

5

AGILE DEVELOPMENT IS NOW THE NEW NORMAL

A recent survey done by HP

of over 200 IT organizations

found that agile is now the

norm.

Only 2% of organizations were

pure waterfall

Source: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/survey-agile-new-norm

Leaning Towards Agile 51%

Hybrid

24%

Pure Agile 16%

Waterfall 7%

Pure Waterfall 2%

May 6, 2019 6

DEVOPS ADOPTION

Forrester has announced 2018

to be a year of enterprise

DevOps, as more than 50%

of enterprise businesses are

now actively using internal or

external DevOps services.

Source: https://go.forrester.com/blogs/2018-the-year-of-enterprise-devops/

May 6, 2019 7

DevOps is a way of collaborating and

industrializing using highly automated

approaches to continuously deploy

solutions that evolve as fast as a business

needs it.

A team-centric ethos that tears down

traditional silos to tightly integrate

business, development, and operations.

Everything is automated to speed up

the application development and release

process, and eliminate manual errors.

DevOps is a significant change to how most IT originations operate

WHAT IS DEVOPS?

May 6, 2019

8

IS THERE A PM ON A DEVOPS TEAM?

While not two organizations deploy DevOps the same, there typically is not a role for the PM on a DevOps team

DevOps does not explicitly define roles like Project Management, however, all the fundamental skills of a Project Manager is essential.

However, the kind of generalized practices suggested by PMBOK are replaced by highly specialized techniques that rely heavily on automation.

In fact, much of the "work" of today's PMO will be eliminated as AI takes on traditional PM functions, and reporting PMOs will disappear.

May 6, 2019 9

SO WHAT IS A

PM TO DO?

May 6, 2019 10

THE CHALLENGE NOW FACING AGILE AND DEVOPS TEAMS

As companies have adopted Agile and

DevOps a new challenge has risen up.

It’s nearly impossible to evenly adopt

DevOps across all teams at one time (big

bang).

Often, teams working on the same solution

operate independently and asynchronously.

That makes it extremely difficult to

integrate the full system routinely.

And even if that was possible, most

applications do not have the architecture

needed to support the new Agile Release

Train (ART)

May 6, 2019 11

THE TEAMS ARE

SPRINTING, BUT

THE SYSTEM

ISN’T.

May 6, 2019 12

SCRUM OF SCRUMS

One solution we attempted was to conduct a Scrum of Scrum meeting to coordinate releases.

Flow through the system is visualized, managed, and measured by the Program Kanban.

The goal of the Scrum of Scrums should be to make sure the individual teams make their sprint goals, and that the overall project goal of all the teams is met.

There is a role here for the PM to coordinate and run these meetings.

May 6, 2019 13

THE SCALED AGILE FRAMEWORK (SAFe) PROVIDES A SOLUTION

First Introduced in 2011 to deal with the challenge of widespread Agile adoption.

Rapidly growing in use as more companies are now adoption agile and DevOps

The SAFe model represents enterprise agility and extends Scrum beyond the team execution level into the organization.

SAFe provides the framework that enables large teams consisting of 50 to 125 individuals to develop products and deliver to market using frequent cycles of three months

May 6, 2019 14

HOW CAN

CANDANCE &

SYNCHRONIZA

TION BE

ACHIEVED?

By focusing on the full

system rather than just the

individual components.

May 6, 2019 15

THERE IS OPPORTUNITY FOR THE PM WHEN SAFe IS USED

According PMI in a article titled “The PM Role in a Lean And Agile World:

The SAFe model provides the best opportunity for the PM to use skills obtained from PM training.

The enterprise focus of SAFe provides the PM with a landscape to operate within the strategic, leading, and lagging PM roles introduced in this paper.

There are new roles for the PM to play and thus new skills to be learned.

Transforming the PM to the lean and agile thinking will enable change, and organizational change management (OCM) provides the appropriate techniques to support sustainable change.

Source: https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/pm-role-lean-agile-world-9350

May 6, 2019 16

THE ESSENTIAL SKILLS A DEVOPS PM NEEDS TO ADD VALUE

Servant Leadership

DevOps needs a skill of servant leader, who can coach, answer questions, assists and help the team visualize the flow end to end. PMs need to be more involved in the actual guts of the dev and release process and use new skills building Value Stream maps and Kanban Boards to facilitate communications.

Change Master

Each team is managing change and releasing features almost continuously, and a high level of collaboration and communications is needed. PM’s need to be in the know on a daily basis, hustling down issues before the train leaves the station.

Quality Leader

DevOps makes use of CI/CD to deliver results fast, but quality cannot suffer. The Quality Management Disciple has always been an integral part of Project Management and the PM must ensure there is a continuous process to be followed across Analysis, Design, Development, and Deployment for DevOps teams.

Tools Expert

DevOps is about, among other things, tighter alignment and collaboration among once-siloed roles. That includes standardizing on a toolchain. PMs should not be an exception here.

May 6, 2019 17

THE NEW TOOLS THE PM MUST GET TO KNOW

There are many tools on

the market now to assist

DevOps teams.

At a minimum, be sure you

now the tools that are used

to track project, such as Jira,

and facilitate project

objective, such as

Confluence.

You can add value by being

the go to person for these

tools.

May 6, 2019 18

NEXT GENERATION PMO Andy Jordan, Chief PMO Writer For PMI’s

Projectmanagement.Com Suggests that

Strategic PMO’s are:

Centered around portfolio management

Have relationship management – contacts

across the organization

Have mastered dependency management –

to really understand the impact of decisions

made

Focus on alignment management – across

the whole organization

Have Proactive issue management – a low

tolerance for variance.

Source: https://www.strategyex.co.uk/blog/pmoperspectives/the-next-generation-pmo/

May 6, 2019 19

THE FUTURE ROLE OF THE PMO

Build a plan to become the centers of change and innovation, thus enabling the organization to change faster.

Staff the PMO function with change experts, not process experts by diffusing processes throughout the organization and automating it as much as possible.

The role of the PMO needs to shift to be more based upon delivery and project results and less upon enforcing practices and procedures.

There is a need to shift PMOs and Project Managers from requiring process adherence and tool adoption to facilitators of adaption of processes/practices and supporting “what works.”

May 6, 2019

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CONCLUSION

In a fast moving agile world there is a role for the PM and the PMO

To survive the PM must transition to higher value skills that are not easily automated

If you are in a reporting type PMO, make plans to transition to a Strategic PMO and help the company transition to the digital world

If possible, get SAFe Certified

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