VMO. PMO. LACE. What you really need is a guiding coalition. Here’s why.

VMO. PMO. LACE. Maybe you have a center of excellence or community of practice. What are all these groups, and what do they do? How do they work together? Do you need all of them? The bottom line is this: the goal of every transformation is better business results. And to achieve that, you need to connect strategy to execution. But if the right people aren’t involved, nothing is going to connect. Depending on where you are in your agile maturity and whether you are undertaking a full transformation or simply trying to get better alignment between business goals and work, you may or may not need one or all of these groups.

But you do need some sort of guiding coalition that is responsible for outcomes and has the authority to enact change.

Making sense of the ccronyms

First, let’s take a step back. 

Traditionally, work was structured around programs and related projects. Because of this, most people are familiar with the PMO—a program or project management office—which is responsible for managing programs and/or coordinating the delivery of projects. However, organizations that adopt agile ways of working typically move to a more value-based approach to work. SAFe introduced the term VMO, value management office, to better acknowledge and address this change and the need to manage value streams.

A LACE, or Lean Agile Center of Excellence, is focused on managing the transformation itself, while a community of practice is focused on a broader range of competencies.

All these groups can and should work together in a complementary way. As an example, Scaled Agile, Inc., does a really good job of explaining the nuances of this on their website, if you’d like to read more.

The Guiding Coalition—Keepers of alignment, agents for change, champions of outcomes

All organizations, no matter their size and and no matter how mature they are in terms of adopting agile practices, can benefit from better alignment between business goals and work. When these are aligned, you can create more value and drive better outcomes for your business—and more importantly, your customers. 

Regardless of what you call it, you need some sort of guiding coalition to help you take incremental steps toward becoming increasingly more aligned. That guiding coalition serves as the keeper of alignment and organizational change agent. It must have both the responsibility for achieving the desired outcomes and the authority to enact change.

Stay with me on this.

Your executive or leadership team typically defines the company identity. They establish the organizational mission which guides how you make money today; the vision, which guides how you will make money in the future; and values, which guide how you make decisions. These things collectively, along with an understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, inform your strategy, which is a risk optimized path for achieving your business outcomes. The organization then has to determine where to invest dollars to bring that strategy to life. This is the point at which strategy begins to align with execution.

Your guiding coalition—in SAFe it’s most aligned with the concept of a LACE—is responsible for delivering the business outcomes, like improved quality, time to market, employee productivity and engagement. They typically work closely with the people who determine where dollars are invested. It’s their job to figure out what needs to change about the way you’re working to improve and maintain alignment between strategy and execution. And because communication is a two-way street, it’s also their job to keep leadership informed of anything that might mean a change to the company identity, strategy, or goals.

The guiding coalition is who the broader organization looks to to make changes and put the people, practices, technology, and training in place, for example, as part of their partnership with the PMO or VMO, so the organization can achieve its goals. The LACE owns the ways of working that create meaningful change, while the VMO operationalizes it. Think of it this way: the LACE is the developer group that creates new, more effective ways of working, and the VMO is the end user of those new practices. They need each other.

Augmenting your Guiding Coalition—Agile Master Practitioners

More than 70% of transformations fail. One of the reasons is that the people who are responsible for delivering outcomes do not have the authority to make the changes that will enable the organization to achieve its goals. Whether you have a VMO, a LACE, a PMO, all of them or some other sort of guiding coalition, that authority is critical to their success.

Once you have a guiding coalition in place, the challenge becomes knowing what changes to make. What will truly move the needle for your organization? An outside perspective can be enormously helpful in determining where you want to go and creating a tangible and achievable roadmap for getting there.  That’s where an Isos Technology Master Practitioner can help.

Our Agile Services Master Practitioners embed in your VMO or LACE, help identify the problems worth solving, providing right-sized, practical guidance around practices, and processes and technology in places to help you achieve your transformation goals.

Interested in learning more about what our expert consultants can do for your organization? 

Contact us!