PM Insight Sunnyvale

Silicon Valley is home to some of the most impressive technology companies in the world. Within this small geography you will find Fortune 50 companies mixed among a sea of startups. Each company will have its own unique culture, but there are some common traits among the two tiers of corporate and startup that set them apart.

I have had the opportunity to work on many different project teams across world class operations and within small early-stage startups. The main differences between the two are: working knowledge, stakeholders, available resources, agility, and speed.

What used to take me months to plan with a team of engineers and analysts in corporate companies could be accomplished in weeks with a small agile team of specialists in an early-stage startup. While the corporation is setting up their project boards in their favorite online shared resource, a resourceful project lead is creating lines of tasks in a shared spreadsheet at a startup.

Disciplined Agile (DA) is a toolkit that enables simplified process decisions around incremental and iterative solution delivery. DA builds on the many agile and lean practices and helps identify how they can be extended across your organization.  

We will walk through a case study to demonstrate how the framework can be applied to make informed process decisions to enable successful outcomes. In break-out groups, using a scenario-based approach, you will take real-world scenarios and dig into DA to make some choices for guided continuous improvement of the scenario. 

Technology and process excellence will only get you so far. In the end, it is the people who make an organization successful. Leadership is far different from management, and just as important. Leadership is not about position in an organization chart or title on a business card. Many people occupy the position of leadership without demonstrating the qualities of leadership. An effective business leader must possess both subject matter knowledge and strong interpersonal and communication skills. 

Leaders must adapt their leadership style to the readiness of the follower. Leaders must hold the space for their followers to implement and adhere to common sense practices when time pressure and inexperience may tempt them to choose less effective means, or otherwise gives participants a glimpse into what’s required to be a positive force of leadership regardless of their position or title, and increase success in their professional lives. By following the simple, effective, proven guidelines in the Leadership Challenge, by Posner and Kouzes, participants will be able to put into action leadership that others admire and willingly follow as well as the ability to enable others to achieve their greatest potential, results that may seem highly unlikely or even impossible to those unskilled at unleashing the potential of others.

Business transformation involves making fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with shifts in market environment. History has shown how businesses that failed to make those fundamental shifts have failed dramatically.

Increasingly Business transformation has been associated with Digital transformation of the organizations, and those companies that drive the Digital first strategy are the ones that succeed. The key operative word in digital transformation is the ability to drive thetransformation. Successful transformation requires the companies to embrace agility.

Transforming the enterprise requires Scaling Agility to the enterprise. Though there are a few approaches to scaling agility, none have been as successful as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In this presentation, we will cover how Scaled Agile Framework helps to drive various aspects of Digital Transformation in Organizations, and in turn successfully enable Business Transformation. We will also cover what is the role of a Program Manager in Scaling Agility.

Everyone seems to be talking about DevOps or DevSecOps or DevSecTestOps. What does any of that even mean? And should I even care? How does DevOps fit into the ubiquitous "Agile" landscape? What are the implications for my project plan when my team wants to adopt DevOps? These are some of the questions I will attempt to answer in this overview of DevOps and discussion of the key principles and practices which have consistently shown up as characteristics of high performing teams and highly competitive organizations.

This LinkedIn Social Selling Training will arm you with the tools and strategies to guarantee your posts get 1000 views in 48 hours. You will learn how to leverage the power of the LinkedIn algorithm to maximize your visibility, as well as actionable methods for engaging with prospects and promoting thought leadership. We'll cover advanced tactics such as post optimization, hashtag use, content amplification, and more. By the end of this training, you’ll be equipped to boost your presence on LinkedIn and effectively influence your target audience.

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.