For a business to be agile, it isn’t enough to have agile projects. You also need agile governance that can speed up decision making, deal with overload, queues and deviations, and enable you to work continuously on your strategies.
Parmatur Pulse is an organizational model built on pulse meetings. Pulse implements Agile Governance as well as Agile Project Management. Pulse provides tools and procedures that will enable people to act and together transform the organization into an agile project business.
Agile decision process
Pulse meetings are conducted frequently, generally daily, for coordination and decision making within a cross functional team. Pulse meetings takes place in front of a pulse board that is visualizing goals, plans, actions, status, problems and decisions for the work that the team performs. The pulse board is updated by the team during the pulse meetings to show the latest available information.
All the pulse meetings are conducted in the pulse room. Thereby they will form a chain of decisions. Problems are raised and dealt with promptly in this network of pulse meetings.
In this network of pulse meetings, there are pulse meetings with different participants and scope. There are pulse meetings for operational work such as project, assignments and weekly resource allocation. There are also pulse meetings for strategic work such as portfolio management and product management.
The visualized information on the pulse boards in the pulse room and the network of daily pulse meetings on operational and strategic level creates a system for agile governance of the project business.
Takes control of the workload
Pulse provide tools so that the participants can see the workload in the individual teams on a daily bases, and also for the system as a whole with all the ongoing projects in the project portfolio. The lead times in the projects are to some extent set by the portfolio managers as they start new projects.
The visualization will signal any overload. That will prevent individuals from starting too many tasks at the same time. Bottlenecks are identified at the resource pulse meetings. Scattering of resources on many projects is prevented.
The managers know that overload will reduce the through flow, create stress and cause quality problems. So they will act on the situation visualized in front of them. Pulse provides the tools to multiply throughput in the project business.
Reduces the uncertainty
Pulse provide tools so that the participants are encouraged to divide up the projects and assignments into daily tasks. A project of 10,000 working hours will be planned into about 100 sub-results. The sub-result will be divided up as the work progresses forward, each one into 10 activities or more. That will give the project more than 1,000 check sums, some of which will be approve by the managers.
Pulse adds tools so that the participants can deal with deviations and problems, that naturally will occur in all projects. Problems that the teams can’t solve themselves will be escalated in the network of pulse meetings to the managers for decisions and actions.
Pulse provide tools so that the participants are encouraged to work in teams and cooperate. The skills of experts and specialists are broadened. The cross functional teams have a joint responsibility to deliver according to the goals. The daily pulse meetings, full time resources and the visualization will increase the pressure on the teams – action this day! What work do we have to do today to move forward?
Agile Governance
The cross functional teams have a joint responsibility to deliver according to the goals. They are also free to find their way of dealing with obstacles along the way. We call this mission command.
For delegated responsibility to work, strategic design and a strategic direction is needed. Those are developed and continuously maintained by the product management team and the portfolio management team. Problems and opportunities in the projects or on the market will add information that will trigger adaptation of the strategies. Strategies in Pulse are alive and processed daily.
This is what we call Agile Governance. To implement agile governance in your business, you need to understand the principle of agile management.
Parmatur Pulse 