Organization Design and Programme Management - interview with Henny Portman

Blog

6 Jul

Henny Portman is partner at HWP Consulting and also a consultant, author, international speaker, coach and trainer for both traditional project management (MoP, MSP, PRINCE2, P3O) and agile approaches like AgilePM, PRINCE2 Agile, AgileSHIFT and SAFe. His past experience includes Head of PMO for ING Investment Management and PMO Consultant for NN Group, both major financial institutions in the Netherlands.

We spoke to Henny to discover insights into modern organizational dynamics from the viewpoint of project management, programme management, and portfolio management.

Q1 - You were recently nominated for PMO influencer of the year 2020 - congratulations! What are the key things that a modern PMO should be doing to help accelerate and sustain digital transformation?

I would say familiarize yourself with agile ways of working. In my award-winning article - A bird’s eye view on the agile forest - I wrote about 75 different agile ways of working. You have to understand that just sending some people to Scrum training (for example) will not help. You have to put a lot of effort in engineering practices. You have to train people to make them understand test driven development, you have to invest in automated testing, automated integration and deployment. You have to become the lean-agile life long learning centre of excellence. Start small and simple with the transformation but on the other hand don’t make it too simple. Make use of small teams. Give them as much autonomy as possible. Make sure that dependencies with other teams are minimalized or with other words the teams must be loosely coupled. Empower the teams, give them mandate to make decisions on their own within an agreed bandwidth so they know when to escalate. And if they escalate it takes time to make decisions. See what the Standish Group says about decision latency: Basically, decision latency is the key factor why so many projects fail.

In your transformation program I see at least two parallel tracks. One track focuses on the teams. Start with one or a few teams, dedicated to a single value stream. Let them work or practice, evaluate, learn and adapt their agile way of working, the other track focuses on the agile mindset, the agile culture throughout the whole organization. And this track will definitely impact the teams. Part of the culture will be a continuous improvement mindset. You will never be finished.

Q2 - You recently reviewed the Team Topologies book on your blog. What aspects of Team Topologies stand out to you as someone experienced in programme and portfolio management?

I really liked the book as I wrote in the review on my blog. See also the quick reference card I created after reading the book. I found the following two things the most interesting when reading the book. First you have to understand that there are four fundamental topologies. The stream-aligned team (in the past I would call those teams, feature team), the platform team, the enabling team and the complicated-subsystem team. And second that you have to realize how much those teams can absorb in terms of intrinsic load, extraneous cognitive load and germane cognitive load.

So, when building teams or assigning work to teams to run your projects you have to take in mind that your teams are responsible to deliver working (sub) products. And make sure you don’t overload your teams with too many projects or have unrealistic expectations and asking too much or too complicated or complex things. In my opinion too many organisations are suffering the same problem with projects. They have utilized the people in the teams for 100% or more and that means no flow of value added products to your clients. Compare it with a traffic jam.

Q3 - In the ongoing move away from projects towards products and a sustained flow of change, how will the role of project manager change?

I think that the role of the project manager will change. In the past you could often see ‘command and control’ type of project managers but now they have to become serving managers. I think that the role of project manager will transform into the role of programme manager. For me a programme manager is much more focussing on the change in the organization, he or she is much more a bridge builder, a communicator, coach and facilitator. A project manager is not needed any more to direct an agile development team but to oversee the total picture and to make sure the dependencies between the teams and what is needed within the organisation are managed correctly and to take care of the communication.

I also think that project and programme managers have a key role to play in defining and managing this Enabling team activity across the enterprise. Whether the Enabling teams are part of a Center of Excellence or a looser collection of capabilities and expertise, PMI, IPMA or AIPMO can add huge value by shaping Enabling teams as a highly effective boundary spanning organisational capability.

Q4 - You’ve recently reviewed several books published by IT Revolution Press, including Team Topologies, Project to Product, DevOps for the Modern Enterprise, and The Art of Business Value. What unites these books in your view?

In my view all these books from IT Revolution are must reads when you are starting or halfway through your agile transition. All books go a step deeper than many of those fancy management books about agility. The books I reviewed give you so many real life cases, examples and checklists to support your journey towards business agility that you could say if you are a transition leader you have to shame yourself if you have not taken notice of these non overlapping but complementary books.