tor, strategic planning and execution, Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of
Johnson & Johnson, Chatham, New Jersey, USA. “And that collaboration should
happen from design to execution to close.”
A project management office (PMO) can help facilitate that type of cross-
functional support, says Mr. Patel. On his digital projects, the project leader
meets with a forum of senior managers from different areas of the business to
present the project initiation document. “Then each member from around the
business advises whether they’re involved in a RACI [responsible, actionable,
consulted, informed] matrix, so that by the end of the meeting the project
manager knows which areas are connected and whom to engage,” Mr. Patel says.
That upfront collaboration also means customer issues that do arise can
be dealt with swiftly. For example, at another organization Ms. Rutkowski
worked for, complaints started coming in that a button for visually
impaired customers had stopped working on its banking website
and app. The organization realized that having collaborative partnerships across the teams that were impacted
helped them more quickly solve the problem. The
complaints team, product customer experience
team, agile guild (which supports the growth
of agile culture) and website technical team
all worked together to rapidly assess and
determine the cause and extent of the
impact, Ms. Rutkowski says.
Such access issues were prevent-
ing visually impaired customers from
using the service. So the team fast-
tracked a solution into a project
sprint already in motion, re-engaged
the customer to test the fix and
then updated the system with the
solution. Finally, the project team
combed through the sprint to figure
out the root cause. “We determined
that different agile teams weren’t
using the same accessibility-enabled
components, and that caused the cus-
tomer experience process to break,” says
Ms. Rutkowski. “So we reviewed and
updated our accessibility library and com-
municated that to all of the agile guilds to
prevent that issue from occurring again.”
The real solution isn’t only a product that works,
she says, but fewer customer experience flaws moving
forward. “A project that loses sight of its end user can’t
deliver true value—no matter how on target it is with sched-
ule, budget and scope,” she says. PM
“A project that
loses sight of its end
user can’t deliver true
value—no matter how on
target it is with schedule,
budget and scope.”
—Kathryn Rutkowski, PMP
