Value Management Office

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. So how are you today, Dave? I'm doing excellently well, Peter.

Been another great week. Looking forward, summer is kind of around the corner, I'm going to say. Not in the air just yet, but it's around the corner.

Oh, fantastic. I mean uh I I can't wait for that too. It's uh still a little chilly here, and I'm looking forward to warm up and uh get out there a little bit more. Be nice. That's all.

What's the advantage of being in Vancouver? We get a hint of it just a little bit bit earlier than it never quite gets us cold. So what are we talking about today? Well, uh, you know, I I've had some fantastic conversations in the last few weeks around value management offices or the the shift towards measuring value pre projects over products, this sort of push. And and I think it's uh, you know, we have a product ourselves called the Product Office, which kind of tries to address some of these things, but this it's really honing in on what is the role of an agile PMO or project management office in in the you know where we are today. There's a lot of attention being put to that.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I I see this a lot too. It's um this this shift from projects to products, this understanding of uh how value streams exist in the organization, the continual supporting of those value streams with long-running teams where we uh we're supporting them and working together closely, and it's not a um a project where we have a beginning and an end. And it's so it's operating in a in a different way. And if you're looking at the kind of overarching governance of that, if we're looking at the the office that's helping uh bring all of that together within the organization, uh this this concept of a value management office or a product office seems to be a natural evolution of the uh the PMO idea.

Well, we've looked a lot at this. I I think uh part of what we're trying to look at is that age-old problem of what are you going to deliver and when is a very reasonable question. And a project management office has always been the place that we've gone to historically in all organizations above a certain size where we're gonna say, okay, tell me what's, you know, what's in our portfolio or program, which of these projects are being delivered when, which are on track, which are not. That's in essence, I mean, there's more to a project management office than that. But if I think of it as that sort of oversight governance, sort of, you know, central place that we can go to to understand what's going on, we need exactly the same ease even as we shift from a project mindset to a product mindset. The work being done, it still we still need to be able to answer the question, you know, are we spending the resource, you know, the the investing in the right way? Are we getting things delivered where we need them to be delivered? Uh is the work sort of going as expected versus not? And this whole thing becomes either product versus project conversation, outcome versus output or activity. This is often how it's pitched. The the reality is like, first of all, project management offices and agile project management offices, value management offices, or as we refer to as a product office, they're fundamentally different. They're doing, they're they're approaching the same problem, transparency and governance, in a very different way. And so we've got to sort of understand that from the outset.

Yes, and I think that's where I was going to go next with that, is as if we look at at the evolution, as we look at the uh the adoption of business agility and and what's coming next in the industry and how that's uh evolving, um, if this practice of understanding the the oversight of work, if you like, or at least understanding what work is occurring and and what the impact on the system is uh to the within the organization, uh the this uh this concept, whatever we'd like to call it, uh is one which seems to be uh like an evolution of what is there in the PMO.

Yeah, I I sometimes see it if we see it as an evolution, we end up in that agile project manager world where we have the existing roles and we fling agile at the beginning of it. So you end up with the agile PMO. And part of the headache there is we're now what the what a traditional project management office cares about is different to what a value management office cares about. And there's a couple of assumptions that go in there. One of the first things that we typically are looking for when we're setting up that sort of value management office or a product office is we care about value being delivered. And value is is really difficult to measure. So one of the crucial things when we try and have conversations about what does value mean in an organization is ultimately it means one very simple thing, which is we need to get a change in front of a customer fast. And only when we can get change in front of a customer fast can we then, you know, basically look at the smiley faces or non-smiley faces of the customers. Do they like it or not? Do they use it? Do they find their way to that functionality? And we can start using that to interpret was it a good change or a bad change? So the kind of things that come into that is one is we need short cycle delivery of value going out. In fact, we'll often sit down and look at it. If you're not getting value out in the sort of one to three month time frame, stay with a project management offer. Because the way they're looking at things is probably good enough or as strong as uh sort of governance as you need. So that's the first thing. Are we getting stuff out in a one-to-three month time frame? Uh or or faster, the faster the better, as you might expect. And the second thing is can you somehow see whether or not that value is being delivered? Because too many times we say delivery is the value. And a value management office is gonna say no, delivery is the starting point of measuring the value. It's not where the value is.

Yeah, looking at the measurement, and this is this is brings us to uh to the analogy of this idea that the PMO is issuing your your triptychs, your audience survey maps, if you like. It's like saying, hey, here's here's your plan, and we're gonna help you track you all along this. We're gonna see how far you get along the plan, and this is what it looks like, and maybe we've got something, but it's all very static, already pre-printed and all ready for you to go, versus a more dynamic like uh Google Maps Waze type, um, where we're just gonna navigate to it and we might um we might see on that that hey, uh that this route might take longer, but we might want to take the longer route because it takes us by somewhere else, or it might allow us to go do something else or see some other place, and we can be more dynamic and react more to the environment as we go, uh, which is where we need to be. And the the that difference is where that value management piece happens, where it's helping um guide by providing more visibility into both kind of state and where we see things trending, like if we look at uh um flow metrics and things like this, we're looking at the overall stream and all this kind of stuff.

It's as as you're describing that, I'm just smiling because um that I think it's a fantastic analogy, right? And the project management office is here's my triptych, here's my plan, and then how well do I track along that? And deviations from the plan cause concern. The the immediate if if you if you don't reach a particular point at a particular time, or if you're if you're no longer on the route, it starts yelling at you, right? And in what I'm thinking here is the kids in the back of the car going, Are we there yet? Are we there yet? When you're on a trip, wherever it might be. That's that's in many ways what uh a lot of what we're trying to get.

Yeah, executive.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, and in a value management office or in that perspective where we're going to deviate from the route to achieve the end goal sooner or to get the maximize the value that we have. Like you said, deviate to take in something that increases the value of the entire journey is it's a different, we need to do things differently. Saying, are we there yet isn't useful. We now need to look at this from a perspective of, you know, what is the value? Have we, what value have we delivered? And that comes back to that short cycle delivery. We need to be getting things out of the door every one to three months. Saying that we're we've got the potential for value is not nearly, it's just not useful in a value management office. We need the actual delivery of value.

I agree. I think it's uh we need that ability to understand like how are we progressing and do we need to change and where do we need to go to next? Which is fine, but it's not it's not a static plan. I mean, it's like we've got a we're gonna have to be much more uh dynamic in the way that we can really act and understand how we're going to learn from the where we are today. So so how would you sum all of this up in uh in a few bullet points for our listeners?

This one's a tough one because it's a really like we're peeling back layers and there's much more depth that we can go into.

I was I was actually thinking that, yeah.

Yeah, it's uh I think I omis can feel the the gravity pulling us into a conversation here. Let me um try and just pull out some of the key things. Number one that really strikes me is value management office, however we refer to those, and project management offices aren't synonym. They they live in a different, they do things differently. And again, not right or wrong. It's just we're looking at different, we're looking at the same challenges, uh, transparency, governance, are we on track? Are we not on track? But we're looking through it through a different lens. So we have to understand that difference in lens. The second part to that is part of the sort of prerequisites to understanding it is because we're measuring value, value is something that we measure not in progress. Um, it's not something that I can see as it's being built up. I I measure value by putting something in front of a customer or an end user, seeing if they like it, tasting the meal as we go, not just looking at the ingredients and saying this is going to look like a really tasty meal. And so that that short cycle delivery of something of value to get feedback and kind of gave a rule of thumb of the one to three months type and smaller organizations, two to four weeks, bigger organizations, more complex products, one to three months. If you're not in that sort of delivery time frame, just stay with project management office type of uh uh approach because it's going to be good enough, I think, for that. The third thing is that analogy we just described of, you know, are we there yet? Versus versus what are we, what's the next site that we're taking in? What's the next piece of value that we are able to bring to the table? And that one is is on the one hand, really easy for us to get ahead around because it's visually it's a something that I can get in my head and imagine that. But in the context of business and long-term planning and strategies and so on, can be really difficult to move from one to the other because it is a tendency that we want to plan things out and just get these these things in place that might take us one or two years before we're seeing any return. And we need to be cautious of that.

Yeah, I I think that's a good summation, and I agree that I think there's a few other pieces we could uh unpack and talk about uh more deeply on it, and perhaps on a later podcast around a couple which immediately came to mind for me was like a deeper discussion around the value piece and also then we're talking about uh ways of working and how that relates to the value management office and like the the whole ways of working working coaching and that side of things would be uh I think a a good set of topics for us to explore more. So uh thank you as always, Dave. I I love these conversations, they're they're always entertaining. And uh, if anybody wishes to send us some feedback, they can at feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. And I look forward to next time.

Yeah, great one. Thanks again for the conversation, Peter. Until next time.

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.