PM Insight Sunnyvale

Scrum teams frequently encounter impediments that slow their progress. Some of these impediments are caused by the structures, policies, politics, and culture of the greater organization. What’s a scrum master to do when facing one of these organizational impediments? 

In this session you will meet teams from some dysfunctional organizations and analyze the problems they are facing.  As part of a team, you’ll practice diagnosing the problems and formulating intervention plans. Chris Sims will guide your journey, providing feedback and support the whole way.

What if your project's success was heavily dependent on another department with a radically different culture and business drivers than your project team? Every project leader has had an issue at some point in their career with getting everyone on the same page and ensuring people are working together toward the same goals. It is not an easy task. We need both technical and soft skills to bridge departmental divides and align teams toward achieving strategic goals. Using a case study from a large healthcare system, this session covers tips and tricks from organizational and collaboration models used to establish lasting alignment across teams.

As most projects span departments and organizations, project management professionals are increasingly challenged to align teams with differing business objectives and often contradictory working cultures. Periods of distrust and goals mis-alignment will precede initial coordination and then ultimately deeper collaboration between the organizational units. As part of project planning and stakeholder management, investing time to think about organizational design will provide dividends later.

With data comes baggage. Many teams use metrics to prove their value-add or to show that goals are met or missed. Some use metrics at the individual level to decide promotions or compensation or as a passive form of competition. 

What would happen instead if we used data to inspire richer conversations? What if that data captured team trade-offs and inspired a culture of experimentation as teams played with different ways of working? 

Come hear the story about how one organization did just that. We'll talk about what went right, what went wrong, and what we wished we had done next.

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) influence and impact our projects and how we form our project plan, execution, delivery, and closure. The following areas will be explored as we exercise creative methods to take a head-on approach to the realities of the changing business environment.

Change is comfortable. Until it’s not. Good, beneficial changes are welcome and celebrated. We will examine examples of positive change and how our role, our responsibilities have changed as a result. Conversely, we consider events either with cause or effect that give ‘change’ a bad reputation. Technology is smart. A project manager can gain better visibility and insight into the state of their project and the ecosystem through technology and tools. Used in the right way, at the right time, complexity is reduced, awareness is increased, and momentum is favorable. We will look at technology tragedies as well and what we can do to avoid them. Leadership in a VUCA environment. Our projects, our teams, and our organizations need us to be the leader. Stepping up and leading in today’s environment is challenging and takes considerable effort. We will review examples of good leadership, and leadership that fell short of organizational needs. We close with ways to lead through volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.