Leveraging Product Management to Optimize Delivery

This article is catered to traditional corporate enterprise organizations who have yet to fully embrace Product Management inside their organizations.

I read an article many years ago with the title of, “There are no IT Projects, only Business Projects”. Something about this resonated with me but after 18 years, I am now of the mindset that projects today have become a narrowly scoped body of work tied to a structured funding process. I have found that organization's operational work has swelled substantially as many delivery teams want to avoid the red tape involved with "projects". Operational activity generally flies under the radar, collaboration is minimal and in many cases creates a lot of waste, rework for other teams and increases the risk for the enterprise overall. However, when project work and operational work are planned together across organizational silos, aligned to business strategy and the effort statistics are fully transparent, you have the makings for transformation.

In the world of agile, the word "project" has taken on new meaning. A company can now have an idea, build it to 30% of the requirements at half the time and choose to “go” or "no go” faster than the idea can navigate its way through an antiquated project chartering process.

So what do these out dated, stale cultures do when the world of innovation has moved from projects to products, waterfall to agile, idea to concept to innovation work streams? You have to transform. But how?

First, let's get on the same page on what Product Management is versus an Agile framework.

Product Management is about engaging with stakeholders (users, business) to determine what work has the most value and communicating those priorities to the delivery teams. 

The Agile Framework empowers the Product Owners/Managers to communicate vision, set priorities and manage work which occurs with every sprint. 

Using the same logical thinking: people, process and technology, always start with people.

People

While many leaders think their employees are “stuck in their ways” or “resistant to change”, every person in your organization has an idea on how to make their world better and more efficient. What they don’t have is a way to apply those ideas in a way that can be operationalized or even tested without chartering the work.

The first investment to be made is training. If your organization is traditional, where you have project managers, developers, testers, business relationship managers, architects, business analysts, operations and help desk functions, then the organization needs to think about training employees to migrate to a product ownership world or at the very least educate staff on its importance.

I would highly encourage that this effort come from the very top. The CEO should be pushing this into the organization and it should have direct ties to the corporate strategic plan. Each product level strategy must align to the organizations objectives.

For example, if you have a traditional Project Management Office (PMO), significant training in Agile is needed for everyone in the PMO and the supporting delivery areas of the organization. In most cases many company's have made some agile investments already but I would encourage continuous training on Agile as you roll out Product Management in the enterprise. Determining the value of the work is just as important as how the work gets done and everyone in the enterprise needs to understand both.

If the organization is planning on moving to a product management culture, then everyone needs training in what this means. I mean everyone. Business and IT. Look at bringing in a vendor to create a tiered training process, perhaps a high level overview for all employees and more detailed certification programs for delivery teams and core business application owners. It will be essential for everyone to speak the language, follow a framework, and align corporate objectives to this new way of thinking. This will be key to success.

Here is a great article written by Swetha Amaresan published by HubSpot on the 16 Best Product Management Courses Online and In Person to inspire you on training ideas, courses and approaches.

Aside from training, you will need to establish a new job family to support the world of product management. There are various roles which would need to be established to support this capability. Many resources may need to migrate to these product roles from existing ones. Here is a great article from MindtheProduct.com which provides some high level details for these roles titled, Product Management Job Titles and Hierarchy.

Process

After your initial core staff have been trained, the next step is to adapt the methodology to the enterprise prior to a broader roll out of Product Management. Not every methodology has to be used exactly how it is structured. Set up workshops after your core staff training and explore how to create or leverage a methodology that fits into your current culture. For example, one enterprise I worked with trained all of their architects in the Enterprise Architecture TOGAF methodology, then we modified the Architecture Development Method (ADM) to align with Agile and PMBOK project methodology of the organization.

I like this article from Medium.com which is titled, 3 Types of Product Management: Which One is Right For Your Company? This article from Quora is also fantastic and offers a wide range of perspectives from product managers around the globe. It is titled, What methodologies should a product manager know?

Spend time reviewing your operating and desktop procedures with the changes you need to make adopt the methodology to your organization. I have found that this exercise helps bring out gaps in how you are approaching the process changes and helps you fix holes before you do a broader roll out. Ensure this is locked and loaded before you even think about changing the technology to support it. In the workshops, you will find gaps to applying this methodology to current processes. Document these gaps, draw out your current process with your newly trained product management resources. You may find that the gaps you identify may be addressed with technology down the road.

I also recommend that organizations consider modifying their project charter process, and organize projects and operational work around the product work groups. Allow product work groups to prioritize this work based on resource capacity and other portfolio impacts and maintain accurate resource utilization accounts so you can appropriately schedule the work. Teams self prioritize, team members are more engaged in the planning around the product and most importantly feel MORE empowered by their contributions to the product overall. However, what I have found in every instance is that the product driven delivery model delivers up to 2 times more work than traditional project delivery models with effectively the same body of resources.

When there are prioritization issues across these product work streams, use existing governance processes to escalate these challenges to help these teams remove roadblocks. When new projects or demand enter the charter phases, send them to the work groups first to determine if it can cycle through operationally or through an existing project stream versus going through lengthy chartering and funding processes.

Technology

Once your core team is trained, the organization has chosen the right methodology, now the organization must identify the tools to enable product management for the organization that best aligns to the methodology and potentially leverage tools which maybe already be in use.

There are tons of tools hitting the market as well as larger software as a service vendors building these offerings into their platforms like Service Now, Atlassian and Workday. My recommendation is to look internally into your portfolio of applications first. You may already have an existing vendor that you can leverage. Avoid buying anything that will be stand alone and that cannot easily hook into your Service Management, Project Management or existing DevOps processes and tools and ensure you implement a tool with minimal to no customization's. Go for out of the box as much as possible.

Make sure no matter what tool you are considering that you leverage tools on a trial basis first. Many of these tools allow you to try out the tool first. Pilot the tool with a body of work you are already focused on. Allow the core team to come together to ascertain the fit of the tool.

There is a great article on Quora which I refer to frequently as there are a multitude of helpful comments and feedback from Product Managers around the world. This article focuses on what product management tools are best and why.

My other recommendation is to ensure you think about how Product Management fits into your current governance processes and the tools which are utilized to manage this process. You want to ensure you have tight alignment between the initial demand of the business all the way through to the completion of a task regardless if it is tied to a project or operational activity. This information needs to be widely visible to the entire organization and the tools you select need to ensure that this data can be viewed in a multitude of ways; either by Product, by Business Service, by Business Function and/or by Business Capability. This data should also display how the work efforts are tied to the corporate strategy. Ensure that you thoroughly track your operational activity tied to your product and any activity which has linkages to other products.

Lastly, while resource utilization may not be the first thing you tackle when adopting Product Management, this capability needs to be in your end state. It is a MUST HAVE requirement. If you are unable to understand resource implications around your product work load then you are scheduling and planning work blindly. Resource management is the secret sauce to effective product management. I have found that this piece takes time and generally comes in the later stages of product management maturity. Once all resources are familiar with the processes and the tools have been fully operationalized, this should be a key next step to advance your organizations product management maturity.

So the next question you may ask is where do I manage resource management information and how do I hook it into a Product Management system? Some organizations do Resource Management in their ERP system like a Workday then pull this information into their Agile or Project Management system like JIRA or Microsoft Project. I have seen some organizations spread time management across Agile Systems, Project Management Systems, Contractor Time Management Systems and ERP systems and work tirelessly to tie all this together.

This is why my earlier recommendation of leveraging what you have is so important. I have seen hundreds of ways companies manage resource time. My advice is to have one single source of truth for all time management, contractors and employees. Then pull this information into your Product and Project Management Systems if they are disparate. This source of truth can be your ERP system, Project Management System or a Service Management platform like Service Now which does several functions such as Agile, Product Management, Resource Management and Project Management.

Summary of Approach

1. Identify a core product management team, 10-15 People
2. Train core team in Product Management
3. Develop Product Management job family, identify targeted roles for Product Management job family
4. Determine Product Management methodology that best aligns to current processes, document workflows for existing and future state
5. Review your Desktop and Operating Procedures, document gaps and continue to tweak your process flows. Focus on reducing the waste out of these processes if you can.
6. Identify your product work groups and core supporting resources. Determine how these work groups fit into current governance structures
7. Develop your functional and non functional requirements for a supporting product management technology
8. Review internal applications and talk with vendors to determine if technology aligns with your methodology, requirements and existing technology landscape
9. Pilot technology with one work group and body of project and operational activity.
10. Implement product management solution
11. Update corporate strategy, implement enterprise wide training. Ensure messaging and support comes from the highest level of the organization. Align the success of the Product Management effort to the organizations corporate objectives.

I always welcome feedback and thought leadership. Any recommendations you may have I will happily incorporate into this article for others to benefit.