Succeeding with Agile

People

Although it’s called the Project Management Office, the PMO has tremendous influence on the people involved in a Scrum transition. An agile PMO should do the following:

• Develop a training program. There is much to adopting Scrum that will be new and unfamiliar to many team members. The PMO can be a tremendous aid in putting together a training program, selecting outside trainers to deliver the training, or delivering the training themselves.

• Provide coaching. Beyond training people, individual and small-group coaching is incredibly helpful. In a training class, the instructor says, “Here’s how to do a sprint planning meeting,” for example, and perhaps runs the class through an exercise to practice it. With coaching, someone with deep ...