Agile Multi-Project Management with Pulse

For managers in a multi-project business, 2 days.

The course provides an introduction to what Parmatur Pulse is, the building blocks needed for agile multi-project management and how pulse meetings work in a multi-project environment.

Many businesses struggle with overload, unclear priorities, complicated work routines and unclear roles. The situation makes it difficult to cooperate across functional boundaries, which leads to a lack of information and the projects not being able to deliver in accordance with expectations and strategies. Parmatur Pulse handles these problems by starting from the agile principles based on scientific background and providing methods for organization, cooperation and governance.

The course teaches you how to build an agile business and what critical components are required for it to work. The course also allows you as a management team, to created a common understanding of challenges and opportunities with a possible implementation of Pulse.

Introduction Network of pulse meetings	This section presents basic organizational concepts, how an agile organization can be structured and scaled. In Pulse, the organization’s backbone is designed as a network of different pulse meetings.
Even out workload Portfolio and assignment management	Principles for queue theory and Little’s law, and how they affect work organization. A system loaded to more than 80% of its full capacity will suffer from long lead times, high costs and declining quality. Agility is not to work harder, but to reduce queues and lead times so that administration and quality failures is reduced. This section presents the methods used in Pulse to take control of load and queues, with focus on project portfolio and assignment management.
Teamwork Resource management	What is required for people to be able to work together. With the load under control, the project teams can work relatively undisturbed. At the same time, the teams must not become static because they then gradually lose their creativity. This section shows methods for establishing different types of teams suitable for different situations, with focus on resource management.
Real-time planning Frequency of pulse meetings	How detailed planning in real time reduces uncertainty, and how the frequency of pulse meetings affects the size of activities and overhead costs. Uncertainty and risk are constantly present in strategy and development. But uncertainty can be handled by dividing the work into smaller parts so that any errors and problems can be isolated.
Risk management Agile decision-making	How to organize work with different degrees of complexity and uncertainty. Delegated decision-making in teams are linked together with an overall strategy to create an agile decision-making process and transparency. This section will focus on how to design a agile decision-making process from a network of pulse meetings.
Strategic focus and design Portfolio and product team	The work performed by business and product management and the results visualized to focus the company’s resources. Development work is conducted to realize the company’s strategies. To run projects at a higher pace, the business must have the ability to make decisions and reformulate strategies in real time. In this section, we show how the portfolio and product team work in Pulse.
Problem management Strategic decision-making	Unexpected events are a natural part of all product development, where we move in partially unexplored areas. From these events, we can learn something new and create innovative solutions. In Pulse we do not try to minimize the number of unexpected events. Instead, they are handled as a natural part of the business and at a low cost. In this section, we show how the number of strategic decisions increase as the operational teams becomes more agile.