Event report by Konstantina Maltezou, PMP
What is the path of an organization to scale up in agile? Does Agile mindset is necessary if you want to transform the organization and to what extent? What are the tools and technics to go agile? How all these are considered by the European experts of Project Management?
Those and other valuable insights were presented at the PMI Greece Event on Tuesday 18/2/2020 regarding “Agile Adoption and Agile Transformation… we see the difference”. The event was kindly hosted by JP AVAX.
Dr Panos Chatzipanos, president of PMI Greece welcomed the participants (physical and virtual) and presented some insight from the Pulse of Profession like what is the new failure rate on projects and what are the new skill people must embrace in the projectified economy as well as two short but very interesting videos
The first Video was an interview of President and CEO of PMI, Sunil Prasharan on the European CEO channel regarding projectified economy and skills needed by the organisations to be able to transform their business. (Sunil Prasharan video link)
The second video was a Quick introduction to agile management by Harvard Business Review describing shortly but consistently how Agile methodology works. (HBR video link)
The floor was given to Katerina Tsoupinaki,Corporate & Project Governance/QA Director at INTRASOFT International along with her team Rania Alexiou, Dimitris Kokorogiannis and Elena Kopanou who gave significant and insightful information regarding Intrasoft’s transformation process. They described how their journey to become agile was basically generated when they tried to streamline how they ran the projects throughout their organization, how they succeeded and how positive impact this journey had in clients satisfaction for receiving all deliverables in budget, time and scope with excellent quality. Their most important finding was that this procedure made themselves and all employees happier and more engaged and this is what eventually leads to the previous results and the actual transformation of corporate culture. Of course, there were practical issues like resources (even like office-space and boards and tools), to the more significant, like getting the clients to engage in the required feedback during handoffs of deliverables.
Following, Nassos Karageorgiadis PMI LUXEMBURG Chapter, Director of Marketing & Communication, Senior Business Analyst & Project Manager - DG7 gave an overview about the degree of adoption of Agile in three countries (Luxembourg, Croatia and Poland) that participated in the Agile research project which ran in 2019 as a common initiative by PMI European Chapters Collaboration.
Konstantinos Viglas, PMI SWEDEN Chapter, Director of Research CIO, Atea Logistics presented the finding of the yearly review that PMI Sweden Chapter runs with KPMG Project Advisory (The Swedish Project Review 2018). Konstantinos gave a more skeptical approach regarding Agile. To quote him and the research findings: “There is no silver bullet in project management” and “perception differs from reality as the importance of performance in areas such as risk management, benefit and financials, and performance and quality, is considerably higher than the actual maturity in these areas”.
The event was completed with a Q&A session where further insights where given like what is the role of the project manager in the Agile way of project delivery.
PMI Greece would like to thank the presenters and the participants and looks forward to organising the next valuable event for our members.
