The Alignment of Agile Management Methods with Corporate Governance Models

With the widespread adoption of agile methods for project management and product development within large organizations, more and more groups are trying to experiment with these agile methods on real projects. Most learning materials on agile methods assume that a person is using these techniques in a rather small organization -- few agile resources talk about governance and the necessary constraints that apply to any project (agile or otherwise) executing within a complex (possibly even regulated) environment.

This presentation will explain how agile management methods align with standard corporate governance models. In particular, where agile methods interact with business "stage gates" that control the funding of new projects through management approvals of business cases. The presentation will explain how early agile project activities (often grouped together and called "iteration zero") fulfill fiduciary requirements for business governance and how they compare with traditional project management approaches. Also explored will be how pilots or proofs of concept play an important role in the governance of new product development projects, including both agile and traditional approaches.

Testimonials

"Thank you for presenting the topic 'Aligning Agile Methods with Corporate Governance Models' during the project management eShareNet held on July 8, 2010. The topic was extremely informative and the post session response from the attendees is very positive."
- Linda June, PM Center of Excellence, IBM

"Great Job Kevin! Very interesting.... and loved the way you helped explain it."
- G. Giblin

"Great session, Kevin!"
- R. Nicdao

"Interesting presentation. You clearly are an SME. I appreciate your sharing your knowledge."
- L. Gornig, Program Director

"Thank you for the insightful talk on "Aligning Agile Management Methods with Corporate Governance Models --- CRM & IPD in IBM" to the IBM Bay Area Release Management Community earlier this afternoon. It was a very well-organized and compact talk. Many aspects stood out: how you built-up the Standard Corporate Governance Model, and explained how Agile management aligns with it; the visual overlay of the IBM IPD (and CRM) processes on this alignment; how you vividly brought out the common framework inherent in governance models, while helping the audience relate it to IBM models such as IPD and CRM; and your correlating EVM and Agile metrics, which gives a flavor for what metrics practising project managers would need to track. I hope you enjoyed presenting and discussing, as much as we enjoyed listening and participating."
- Badri Krishnamoorthy, Release Manager & Offering Team Lead, IBM