My current PMP PDU (Professional Development Units) cycle is ending in September. And as usual, I must admit, I’m behind. To catch up, I’m watching webinars on projectmanagement.com. Something, I belong to as part of holding the credential with PMI. (I also have a Scrum Master certification. And vendor certs. And need to do continuing learning for those too! Uggh.)
Do you have to do something similar? Do you hold certifications that require you to undertake ongoing learning to maintain them?
I think that most of us do. Yet, we also do learn things, even if it feels like it’s more a checkbox than actually learning, Or if not new, it triggers a memory. Or provides further insight of things we know already.
Which takes me want to talk about this week.
I watched one that was on governance in Agile projects. I know, it sounds like a clash of two worlds.
Governance is really an old school term. Or an enterprise project word. While Agile is, well more agile. Agile teams are self-organizing. So, do they need external governance? Well actually, they do. It’s more a reframe of what governance means under Agile. While team might be self-organizing, senior management wants to measure what is delivered by the team. And know the importance and risk of things worked on.
A shift occurs in what is measured and the intent behind it. They consider shifts in what Agile is trying to achieve by tracking performance when deciding what to measure. The speaker called this a shift to enablement rather than control. Collaboration over conformance. Continuous monitoring. Real time transparency rather than management reporting.
When it comes to metrics, the speaker advocated that these should be pulled by those who need to see them, rather than pushed out by the team. Best done by automated collection and calculation. Rather than by a timely past examination and production. (Though sometimes I think we have to initially do things manually while we are building out automation.)
So why I am I sharing this here. On a mailing list directed not to agile development teams but to online marketers. Because I think we can draw a lot of parallels to the work that we do.
I often say that customer-facing teams were agile before development teams developed Agile. (I know, I sound entitled, lol.) Customer-facing teams focus on delivering customer value. Continuously evaluating and iterating.
We do pull measurement, reporting it in dashboards that are transparent for those who need to see the results real time.
That further insight into what we do already. Though I think we can at times work on transparency and enablement. And we can get bogged down by using attribution as incentive payout, rather than as a learning tool.
To sum up, the biggest takeaway for me is to know the intentions behind measurement. Then, deciding what to measure flows from there.
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