PM-Partners guides their customers at every stage of their Agile journey. Whether starting out, scaling up, or looking to improve on your current Agile delivery, our team can help.
Our focus is on ‘Practical Agile’ – this means a focus on outcomes. If you are making the decision to invest further in Agile, your organisation needs to understand both the ‘why’ and the ‘ROI’ (return on investment).
Our Agile services are method agnostic, however we align to best practice such as SAFe®, Scrum, DSDM® and PRINCE2 Agile®.
PM-Partners’ Practical Agile approach is both modular and flexible. For example, we can start with establishing core Agile skills and behaviour, or for organisations further along in their Agile journey, we can simply focus on your tooling (e.g. Jira) to give you enterprise visibility of your Agile portfolio.
Our approach to Agile is modular:
- Launch your Agile journey
- Improve your current Agile journey
We understand moving to Agile encompasses new ways of thinking, new ways of working, and new ways of interfacing with a world that may not always be agile as well.
Our Agile approach adopts a pragmatic ‘crawl-walk-run’ approach to ensure the foundations are in place before accelerating to Agile at scale.
Most importantly, we focus on outcomes and support your ‘why Agile’ with a laser focus on results and return on investment (ROI).
- Agile culture and mindset
- Core Agile skills and coaching
- Agile framework and operating model
- Agile PMO and lean portfolio management
- Agile tooling for scale
- Agile assurance and governance
- Agile specialist roles
- Agile training and certification
- Agile resources
- Agile capability assessment tool
Moving to Agile entails a significant change in culture and mindset. This means it is a change management exercise. Leadership needs to be engaged and fully behind a change that may potentially touch all parts of your organisation.
PM-Partners can help you move to the agile mindset required and drive your change with a proven and structured approach.
Just as importantly, we work with you to establish not only the ‘why’ but also the ‘ROI’ (return on investment) behind the move to Agile. The core principle is to approach Agile practically to deliver outcomes and benefits.
PM-Partners can help with:
- Why Agile and the business case
- Agile mindset and culture
- Agile for leaders
- Agile coaching
- Organisational agility review and roadmap
The Agile Journey: Embracing an agile mindset
Before you can ‘do agile’ effectively, however, you first need to ‘be agile’. This involves adopting a new way of thinking or ‘agile mindset’ that is based on prescribed values and principles..
Establishing core skills is fundamental to any Agile journey – without a solid base and understanding it is difficult to drive excellence and scale.
Like any other newfound skill, it can take time to embed and apply these successfully in the workplace. Specialist Agile coaches are critical to this process and can help to drive the right mindset, behaviours and ceremonies across the team.
Using a practical Agile approach we focus on ensuring the foundations are solid before scaling or adding to the capabilities of the team. Too often, running before you can walk can set you back months.
PM-Partners can help with:
- Core skills
- Specialist skills e.g. Scrum master, product owner
- Agile coaching
- Agile maturity assessment and improvement roadmap
- Skills embedding
10 ways to embed Agile across your organisation
In a rush to adopt Agile and benefit from its potential impact, many organisations are overlooking what it takes to successfully integrate Agile in the workplace. Here we share our top 10 tricks to embed Agile and ensure your transformation effort lives up to its promise.
As your Agile journey gains momentum, a vital step is to ensure there is standardisation and a common approach across your teams and organisation.
The most common way to achieve this is to pick the right Agile methodology for your organisation, then build out a framework (or ‘playbook’) that your people can use as their ‘how-to’ guide in their day-to-day roles. This is critical for driving consistency, quality and velocity.
Additionally, Agile often means a change in the way you work, so establishing a new operating model is a natural step to progressing with the Agile journey. The new view of people, processes, technology and data as you continue your progression.
PM-Partners are experts in:
- Agile methodology selection (e.g. Scaled Agile (SAFe®), DSDM, Scrum, PRINCE2 Agile®, hybrid)
- Agile frameworks
- Agile operating models
- Current state review and improvement roadmap
Building an EPMO and common project delivery framework for Camden Council
A prominent NSW council with a large capital projects portfolio needed to improve its delivery capability. Here’s how PM-Partners helped to transform project management practices, lift performance and optimise results.
Success in Agile goes hand in hand with tracking results and proving your organisation with the transparency on the portfolio. Tracking of metrics and integrating with the other parts of your organisation is critical.
Most organisations have a PMO and/or ePMO, which will need to evolve with the new ways of working to become a ‘hybrid PMO, encompassing both Agile and non-Agile portfolios.
As your Agile adoption scales and the size of your Agile portfolio increases, moving to lean portfolio management becomes a critical capability within your organisation, both to prioritise and track a growing number of teams and their backlogs.
PM-Partners provide expert services in:
- PMO set up and build
- Hybrid PMO
- Lean portfolio management
- Agile portfolio review and improvement roadmap
Agile transformation helps Prezzee with global ambitions
PM-Partners supported Prezzee with its agile transformation. The team helped the eGift card platform deliver an ambitious two-year growth strategy by adopting a new scalable, dynamic and innovative operating model based on Agile practices.
Agile tools are often picked by default and grow organically once Agile is kicked off. This, however, leads to inconsistencies of use and stops the organisation from getting a true picture of progress, especially when you need to scale to portfolios.
Another typically scenario is where multiple tools are in play and the most suitable platform needs to be chosen and moved into mainstream use.
Our experts can help bring clarity and results to your Agile tools through:
- Agile tool tenders and selection
- Agile tool clean-up and standards frameworks
- Portfolio and product reporting
- PPM tool integration
Lean Portfolio Management: the key to getting back on track
Looking to get back on track after the events of 2021? Find out how to align strategy with execution using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) through Lean Portfolio Management. Apply lean and systems thinking to strategy and investment funding to enable business agility.
Few portfolio and delivery teams are perfect, and there is often the need to keep a watching brief on performance to ensure poor performance and results do not creep into the portfolio.
By proactively applying assurance and governance to Agile teams and portfolios, you can drive quality and results, addressing possible issues before they translate into poor results.
PM-Partners offers a range of agile assurance and governance services to drive continuous improvement and quality, including:
- Agile maturity assessment and improvement roadmap
- Agile capability reviews and uplift programmes
- Agile health-checks
- Agile set-Up for success
- Agile post implementation reviews (PIRs)
Agile transformation case study
A large data analytics firm approached PM-Partners to design a framework for delivery of their products using a Lean Startup and Agile methodology. The organisation had no project delivery framework (neither Waterfall nor Agile), and employees familiar with product delivery processes were rare.
As you move further along your Agile journey, you will find specialist roles such as product manager and Agile coach are challenging to skill-up and maintain. In addition, driving consistency across these roles can be difficult.
PM-Partners can help in a number of ways:
- Training for specialist roles
- Operating models and playbooks for specific roles
- Specialist role coaching
- Specialist resources and experts
Agile project initiation
Our client’s Technology department was requested to land its latest project using Agile methodology. Some of the employees had some light Agile experience from their previous organisations, but there was a lack of common understanding on how to actually run an Agile project.
Equip your team to deliver business value at speed.
Agile is an approach and a progressive way of thinking. It encompasses a set of techniques that enable teams to accelerate delivery and minimise waste, resulting in increased visibility and value.
Our certified Agile workshops have been designed to deliver insights, practices and a greater understanding of implementing Agile methods into both blended and traditional environments.
Watch Simona Dimovski from Sutherland Shire Council discuss the challenges they faced amid the global pandemic and how their strong focus on agile mindsets enabled them to pivot.
We work with you to understand your agile environment.
We work with you to understand your agile environment and deliver a flexible and scalable agile resourcing service. This ensures you have the right people, at the right time, committed to delivering results.
Recognised as a viable strategy for accelerating delivery, Agile is an iterative and incremental approach that results in regular ‘inspect and adapt’ cadences. When in the right hands, it greatly reduces both delivery costs and time to market.
Whether it’s one professional or an entire agile team, our specialist resourcing services focus on delivering the right people with the right expertise. Our large pool of talent on our books, as well as an extended network of proven experts who have worked on PM-Partners engagements repeatedly. Contact us to discuss your requirements.
Some of our customers
PM-Partners’ Capability Hub allows you to assess and track your Agile behaviours, so you can drive improvements across your team and organisation.
Through Agile assessments, you can assess:
- Organisational agility
- Agile fundamental capabilities
- Product owner capabilities
- Scrum master capabilities
- Full spectrum of scaled Agile capabilities
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