Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Senior Program and Operations Leader, Maria Coombe. The following is her story:
The company was experiencing a high volume of resignations of cleared systems and software engineers. This was impactful for two reasons: 1) Completing contract deliverables was difficult as personnel resigned; and 2) Investment loss (the company provided training; sponsored clearances; and had expended money with finding, recruiting and onboarding the resources). An estimated $140M in overhead costs was spent on staffing initiatives. I was hand selected as the Program Manager for the development of an enterprise workforce planning solution aimed to reduce the overhead expense by discarding duplicative staffing routines, duplicative tools, and integrating disjointed processes. The enterprise solution consisted not just of the product, but would also coordinate and align other enterprise organizational entities, specifically business process / requirements; change management; and product deployment. The program had been attempted for three years with two different PMs, and a solution had not been delivered to date.
Lack of communication, coordination, and trust amongst the teams had to be fixed. The four teams (business process / requirements; change management; and product deployment; and product development) needed to talk to each other, work with each other, and more importantly, trust each other. The application / product development team was the most “not trusted” team – the other teams felt their voices of what they needed the solution to do were ignored and they were going to be “provided a solution”, whether they liked it or not.
I transitioned the program to an Enterprise Agile – not popular by the teams or even my boss, (“Agile is only for software development”; “This is too big of a change and will require too many resources”). I reiterated that Enterprise Agile provides visibility and iterative product delivery. I demonstrated Agile and visibility “in action” because the first team transitioned to Agile was the product development team. I invited the other teams to the Sprint Reviews and they experienced what I had conveyed – visibility into the evolution of the product. I broke down the barriers (mostly, if not solely, around lack of transparency and communication) that had been put in place for the past three years and with the two prior PMs, and the four independent teams work cohesively together as one team.
Reaction was noticeable first with the Chief Product Owner – whereby upon conclusion of the first and second Sprint Reviews, she knew more about what was happening on the program, or what was not happening; knew what team was doing what and where she needed to remove blockers – she had more insight into the program than she had had previously and she was thrilled. Similarly, the teams started to experience the benefits. It was a different way of doing business, but they were on-board and saw the benefit. We worked together like a team; we communicated, and helped each other achieve the goal of delivering a solution.
Contact Maria via Linkedin or her CareerWebFolio©.
Fred Coon, CEO
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