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Interview with Mike Palladino

 

Agile Lessons Learned in Business,

Projects & Life

Interview with Mike Palladino

Director of the Agile Center of Excellence
Bristol Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals

Interviewed by Yasmina Khelifi
International Correspondent, PM World Journal
Paris, France

Introduction to the interviewee

Michael Palladino is an Agile and Program Management professional with broad experience across several industries. He is the Director of the Agile Center of Excellence at Bristol Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals. Mike is an adjunct professor at Villanova University teaching courses on Agile and Project Management and is a PMI ATP trainer.  He is a Past President of the PMI Delaware Valley Chapter (PMI-DVC) in the United States and an author for Data Management University Magazine. He has presented in many countries for over 20 years.


Interview

  • • •

Q1:     First of all, thank you for accepting an interview request from PMWJ. Could you explain the role of an Agile Center of Excellence? What does it bring to an organization, to the teams?

Mike Palladino (Palladino):   The Agile Center of Excellence owns the collective knowledge of Agile within the company. We help people, teams, groups, departments, and divisions learn how to incorporate Agile and change the way they work to produce dramatically better, faster, and quicker with higher quality results.  I have responsibilities to work Enterprise wide, worldwide.  We provide training, coaching, support, assessments, and tune-ups to our teams.

Q2:     Could you explain your daily activities as the Director of an Agile Center of Excellence?

Palladino:     I’ve established Agile as a viable and highly desirable approach to solving problems. My current daily activities involve meeting with new areas, and teams to help them determine if Agile is right for their work, and if so, map out how my team can become involved. I tell those who are interested in Agile that I am happy to meet with any level of leadership and speak at any event or Leadership or team meeting as needed.  I cannot guarantee success but am willing to have the conversation.  I share successes that other teams have delivered in the company and use the results to entice them to try Agile, too.

At these meetings, I typically challenge leaders on allowing their teams to try something new.  If the new changes do not work, we can easily go back to the previous way of working.  But if the new ways do work, they’ll receive amazing results and help the leaders meet their objectives.  I ask them to take a chance.  They may be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Q3:     What’s your definition of Agile in project management?

More…

To read entire interview, click here

How to cite this work: Khelifi, Y. (2021). Agile Lessons Learned in Business, Projects and Life: Interview with Mike Palladino, PM World Journal, Vol. X, Issue XII, December. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/pmwj112-Dec2021-Khelifi-Interview-with-Mike-Palladino.pdf


About the Interviewer


Yasmina Khelifi

Paris, France

 

Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI- ACP, PMI-PBA is an experienced project manager in the telecom industry. Along with her 20-year career at Orange S.A. (the large French multinational telecommunications corporation), she sharpened her global leadership skills, delivering projects with major manufacturers and SIM makers. Yasmina strives for building collaborative bridges between people to make international projects successful. She relies on three pillars: project management skills, the languages she speaks, and a passion for sharing knowledge.

She is a PMP certification holder since 2013, a PMI- ACP and PMI-PBA certification holder since 2020. She is an active volunteer member at PMI France and PMI UAE, and a member of PMI Germany Chapter. French-native, she can speak German, English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and she is learning Arabic. Yasmina loves sharing her knowledge and experiences at work, in her volunteers’ activities at PMI, and in projectmanagement.com as a regular blogger. She is also the host and co-founder of the podcast Global Leaders Talk with Yasmina Khelifi to help people in becoming better international leaders.

Yasmina can be contacted at https://yasminakhelifi.com/ or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasminakhelifi-pmp-telecom/

Visit her correspondent profile at https://pmworldlibrary.net/yasmina-khelifi/