Upper Management and Project Change

In the classic project environment, upper management has minimal involvement with course changes within a project. Their primary project roles include endorsing/sponsoring the project, committing resources, setting a project deadline, receiving status reports, managing escalations, and providing rewards to motivate the team. Perhaps upper management's only direct involvement in managing project change might be in approving an unexpected course change before implementation, or encouraging the team to "try something new". Generally, upper management does not get actively involved in steering the project.

In the very fluid world of the agile project, the role of upper management (see Figure 9-1) becomes more active, and not just on the back end by approving changes, but on the front end, influencing them. Upper management is largely concerned with fulfilling business strategy (at least partially) through the successful execution of tactical projects. In a predictable business and technical environment, management would define a set of projects that, in total, would lead to the fulfillment of key business objectives or strategy. These projects would be handed off to various functional areas and cross-functional project managers for planning and execution. Since the projects were well defined and bounded, management could let them run independently and would only need to check on their status periodically.

Figure 9-1: Upper management's role in the agile versus classic project.

On the other hand, an uncertain, fast-changing business environment requires that the business strategy be tightly linked to the tactical projects during execution, as well as in definition, so that each exerts the appropriate influence on the other (see Figure 9-2). Upper management's role shifts to one of understanding the linkages between the business planning process, business strategy, project portfolio, and tactical projects, then facilitating course change decisions based on their knowledge of the high-level business environment.

Figure 9-2: Strategy, business objectives, and tactical projects all exert appropriate influences on each other.

Each of these dimensions (business strategy, business objectives, programs, and projects) may be owned by a different person in the organization. Since there is some ripple effect that ties them all together, it is critical that the owners of each of these dimensions know where they fit in. Generally, a big, upstream change (i.e., a strategy change) will have a greater ripple affect on the downstream areas like the tactical projects, but not always. In the agile world, everything is a project, and whole business strategies may hinge on the outcomes of a few key projects. In a nutshell, there can be a two-way ripple effect. The more you understand how what you're doing may affect someone else, as well as how what they're doing will affect you, the better.

Agile Strategy

Understand and manage the linkages between business strategy, high-level objectives, and the tactical project portfolio to better keep your organization on task to achieve its high-level strategies.

In the agile paradigm, senior management must be more actively involved in understanding project-level decisions, since the ripples caused by these decisions can potentially impact the high-level strategy. Likewise, their strategy-level decisions have potentially magnified downstream impacts; thus, they need to understand how changes in the business strategy may impact a specific project, or all portfolio projects in general, before enacting anything at the high level. In this way, they can avoid adverse downstream consequences that would delay rather than accelerate any desired strategy-level change. I wouldn't think that upper management needs to be intimately up-to-date with all project interactions; however, it should expect to be pulled into the project-level decision-making process more often in the agile environment than the classic one.

In the agile project environment, there is a two-way ripple effect between the high-level business strategy and the tactical project portfolio when either of them change.