Planning Week…

“I am not about to spend a week filling in your template”. Justine was fighting to control herself. She was angry and frustrated. The PMO Director had invited himself to the taskforce planning week, and had told them that filling in butchers paper wasn’t the way to plan. The first step according to the departmental framework was to fill in a “Major Outcomes Request Enterprise Project / Agile Initiation Notification”.

“You can either give me some useful help, or leave.” The words had come out before she could stop herself, and her tone was not one Mark or Kathy had heard before. The PMO Director looked shocked, then after a few moments said “okay, I’ll send someone across”. He walked out.

20 minutes later Wendy walked in. “Hi, I’m Wendy from the PMO.” Then a grin spread across her face. “But don’t hold that against me, I’m actually going to try to be helpful”.

The taskforce trio all chuckled.

“Ok Wendy, yesterday we were trying to figure out our top 10 priorities, which Mark has written up, but we put over 100 activities on the list, so we have some work to do.” “Where should we start?”

“Do you mind if we take a step back and I just ask you a couple of questions?” asked Wendy. Justine nodded, and Wendy wrote the following questions on the whiteboard as she spoke:

  1. Who is involved?
  2. Why does the taskforce exist?
  3. What will you have when you are finished?
  4. How are you going to do things?
  5. What happens after this week?

Justine smiled to herself inside: I like her already.

To be continued…