Agile Management Office

Agile Management Office Pty Ltd (AMO) is a Melbourne based professional services company that provides services in strategy, consulting, governance and operations relating to projects, programs and portfolio management for medium to large scale businesses. With a team of experts in project, program, and portfolio management from a wide variety of industries, we provide a flexible and adaptive approach agnostic of methodology, or technology delivering solutions. AMO was founded by Fatimah Abbouchi in 2016 as an evolution of the traditional Project Governance practices. AMO was developed to respond to current governance frameworks which were observed to be rigid in nature, causing companies to constantly re-invent and re-implement similar strategies, and increasing disconnect between governance and delivery practices across an enterprise. This was found to be preventing organisations from proactively responding to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment around them.

The AMO Way™

AMO have adopted lean, agile, and proven practice principles to develop a proprietary delivery methodology and long term change framework; currently known as the AMO Way™. It takes the best parts of other delivery methodologies and discards the negatives and has been applied at a number of companies globally. The AMO Way was developed to bridge the gap between organisations applying agile techniques, whilst continuing to utilise traditional governance frameworks originally developed in the 1950’s. The framework shifts the stance from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to Project Governance to an adaptive approach; enabling customisation that aligns to the nature of the initiative and organisation as a whole. This is achieved by moving away from the command-and-control model used by Project Management Offices (PMO), allowing for tools, documentation, and governance structures to be selected based on their relevancy rather than mandated requirement by the PMO Manager; similar to the Agile Methodology.

The differences in the AMO Way™ compared to other methods and frameworks in the industry are that it connects strategy, delivery, and operations across an organisation, providing complete oversight and holistic movement towards an organisation's desired goal. It is also adaptive and scalable due to AMO's capability deployment and uplift model, and boasts a high speed to market and generate results due to a particular sprint cycle during the delivery process and deep root cause discovery to establish the true nature of issues early.

History

Fatimah Abbouchi is the Founder and CEO of Agile Management Office; a thought-leader providing governance solutions for organisations to manage and govern projects in the agile era.

In 2014, the idea of AMO was created, identifying a need for a more modern approach to project governance because current governance frameworks were observed to be rigid in nature, causing companies to constantly re-invent and re-implement similar strategies.

In 2015, the AMO Model was first applied, leading to the establishment of a Global governance function to support an International Transformation Programme. This resulted in the Programme and governance function being awarded most successful by external post implementation review audit and from stakeholders alike.

In 2016, Agile Management Office was born and saw a team of experts onboarded full-time and successfully won 2 major client projects within 6 months of launching. Then moved to work with academics within Australia and Europe to further develop the AMO method.

In 2018, AMO recognised an opportunity to share information, knowledge, and ways in which we are thinking differently. Agile Ideas was born and rapidly became a shared platform, utilising a combination of podcasts, blog, newsletter and YouTube bringing peoples expertise together.

In 2018, AMO secures additional ASX100 clients, where the AMO Method was applied to their Payment Services Department.

In October 2019, AMO launches a selective work-study programme, Project Empire, in conjunction with the Department of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. Three years in the making, the programme will be open to a selective number of Masters of International Studies students.

Presently, the AMO Method continues to be applied at a range of companies across industries as diverse as Media, Retail, Financial Services and Government.

Services

AMO provides services in strategy, consulting, governance, operations and training relating to projects, programs and portfolio management for medium to large scale businesses.

AMO helps in three particular areas:

• Optimise delivery
  • Optimise delivery, projects, and governance and scale at pace by maturing capabilities in a meaningful way and agnostic of technology. Clients that have outgrown their project processes and are in need of change receive access to a wide range of pre-built proven capabilities, processes, and tools.
• Scale responsibly
  • Clients trying to scale with ineffective processes, systems, and capability gaps. They want a cohesive solution to support growth and integrate with teams to make the change stick. They don’t have vision over the status and progress of increasing projects and have trouble ensuring governance and compliance.
• Problem solving
  • Clients that want to accelerate delivery ability, increase team capacity and effectiveness, reduce stress, and improve agility, governance, and staff retention. They may have a new project/program or need a PMO but are not sure where to start. AMO's experts create a Rapid Response Action Plan to help you get out of trouble, achieve quick wins, and do so quickly.

Other services include:

• Capability in a Box + Delivery
  • Modular Capability in a Box + (CIAB+) is a flexible menu of project, program, and portfolio delivery capabilities. Clients choose what they need and AMO plugs the gap in thier processes, tools, and team. They receive Project Management Governance processes and procedural guides, templates, and tools coupled with AMO's delivery support options.
• AMO People
  • Experts providing experts to support business success. This is not your standard recruitment service. AMO looks after clients' entire recruitment process so they can focus on achieving their goals. AMO differentiates by adding a personal touch to all interactions, ensuring good rapport with each candidate & client, creating loyalty.

Resources

AMO has many case studies available on their website.