Organization Departments

Although we followed an agile approach, the project was not embedded in an agile environment. Like most big enterprises, this one was departmentally structured. Therefore, cross-section departments had once been introduced to maintain the organizational hierarchy and to steer and control the projects. This was the main reason why the departments established for process and methodology, tools and technology, quality control and assurance, as well as project planning and controlling, did not think of themselves as service departments right from the beginning of the restart.

Process and methodology

Within less than a week of starting, I received a phone call that I had been expecting from the process and methodology department. After all, I had been contracted as the process coach by the project directly. Some people in the department were upset and others were suspicious of what was going on in this project. Of course, their main concern was that the project was going to use a self-made process and ignore the existing enterprise-wide one. In other words, they were very uncertain about what I intended to do. Before our first meeting, I prepared myself by scanning through the enterprise-wide process and interviewing several project members about their experience with it.

Benefits with enterprise-wide

During the first meeting, I started by pointing out to some good things about this enterprise-wide process. Then I asked the department members if they realized that this process was not particularly well accepted in the company. I explained that in my interviews, a fairly common response to my questions about the enterprise-wide process was that although most of my interview subjects knew it existed, they had neither seen it nor heard of anybody running a project according to this process. Although it was tough for the members of the process department to hear these replies, they had to admit that this was the truth.