IT and Business working together in agile projects
Many software projects suffer from the clash between IT and Business departments:
1) The client requests a new feature.
2) The team develops the code, tests it, and release it.
3) The client rejects the work, undermining the team’s morale.
4) The supportive project manager takes the hit, encourages the team, and passes the ball back to the client.
An effective project manager should know how to change the game, getting Business and IT to collaborate effectively, managing the work as an agile project.
Projects Lifecycle: From Initiating to Closing
In all kind of projects, be them predictive, hybrid, or agile, it is effective for all involved parties (team members, project manager, program manager, portfolio manager, PMO, functional manager, sponsor, requester, and other stakeholders) to be able to distinguish in which management phase the project is now. Simplifying the technical details, a project can be in one of these 4 management phases: 1) initiating (not yet approved); 2) planning (the costly technical work has not yet begun); 3) executing (using costly resources); and 4) closing (technical work completed, in the process of formalizing closure).
Value Driven Project Management
While a project is on execution, the project professional makes decisions to optimize value delivery, which will come during the operational stage—well after the project has been closed. Value delivery is straightforward in agile projects, as management relies on continuous interactions with stakeholders who validate increments toward the final result. In predictive projects, it is possible for value to be delivered after a failed project, or vice versa: the project succeeds but no value is delivered. Through role-based collaboration, PMOs can delegate many project management activities, having more time to anticipate issues and deliver value.
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools (in Projects)
Process-driven project management has been effective until the 21th century. However, today’s projects require people collaboration for many compelling reasons: 1) Requirements are usually not clear enough, and project scope has to be progressively elaborated; 2) Controlling changes, time and cost is less important than value delivery and meeting the business goals; 3) Managers need to make informed real-time decisions, anticipating issues while there are still options to correct project performance, and they don’t have time to read comprehensive documentation from dozens or hundreds of projects; 4) Just one person to manage the whole project is not effective: collaboration is needed because the best solutions may come from one of many stakeholders.
Is your PMO producing Reports or delivering Value?
Most PMOs are seen as internal cost centers adding bureaucracy to projects. PMPeople helps people collaborate on project management professionally, in the cloud, using different roles. PMOs can distribute many management activities, having more time for anticipating problems and delivering value. With PMPeople, the PMO can grow from being a cost center to lead the company in the Project Economy.
Collaborative Roles on Project Management
In the Project Economy, projects need people collaborating as a team from different perspectives. PMPeople does not prevent direct communication needed at all projects. However, it can optimize management helping the interaction between people belonging to the extended project team.
Startups need Professional Project Management
Startups need good ideas, but they can only succeed if they are good in execution, while turning ideas into reality. This means they need to manage projects professionally, avoiding bureaucracy, value driven, working as self-organizing teams of people collaborating proactively. Thanks to technology available nowadays, these people can access their projects online, use specific professional project management roles.
Disciplined Agile: Optimize your Way of Working
In context of project management, despite being comparatively new to waterfall, Agile methodology is widely accepted and works very well in small teams. But what happens when we want to scale up? How can we bring other teams to agility and not just the developers? Here…
PMPeople to Control Agile Projects
1) Centralize professional project management in PMPeople: stakeholders engagement, risks, status reports, time sheets and expenses, etc. 2) decompose the project into work packages, meaning agile releases; 3) Connect work package #0 (the project itself) to Asana list for epics; 4) Connect each release to Asana list for user stories; 5) Managers do not need Asana: they use PMPeople to track epics and stories; 6) Team Members do not need PMPeople: they use Asana to follow their ceremonies and manage their artifacts.
Controlling Agile Projects
In agile projects, there is a disturbing complacency about failure. We are used to statements like «I’ve seen no software project delivered on time, on budget». Do you really think this a problem without a solution? If we let the team do their tasks but nobody is accountable for the project, why is it a surprise when the project is behind schedule and over budget? Agile projects must be controlled as well.