Today we have a guest post from Anthony Mersino. Anthony and I have worked together numerous times. I respect his vision, wisdom and dry humor.
Many organizations create an organization to help with their agile transformation. Various names have been given to these groups. Two that I really don’t like are the Agile Center of Excellence and the Agile PMO. The name is not inconsequential. Here is why I think that establishing a Center of Excellence for Agile is a really bad idea.
The intent of a group like the Agile Center of Excellence is often described as ‘to promote agility in the organization’. That sounds like a good thing, right? What often happens is that the way they go about it actually inhibits agility. What frequently happens is that the Agile Center of Excellence (CoE) focuses almost entirely on standardizing processes and tools, and leveraging scale and efficiencies. What could go wrong? (more…)