Agile Development Practices East 2010: The Agile PMO: From Process Police to Adaptive Governance

Although success stories from individual agile teams abound, agile adoptions often run into significant challenges when companies attempt to scale beyond one or a few teams on a single project or multiple projects. The role of middle management in agile, especially the Project Management Office (PMO), remains poorly defined. PMO managers often are seen as focusing more on process compliance than on business results. However, in the long run, agile cannot succeed without middle management's support and leadership. Sanjiv Augustine shares success stories from industry-leading organizations that are scaling agile to large projects and across many smaller ones. These organizations have developed PMO managers who bring lean discipline to project prioritization, track and monitor the value delivery across projects, support stable teams for higher productivity, and enable mature process adoption through the careful application of metrics, tools, and high-level standardization.