Category Archives: 1. Knowledge

SCRUM

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Arguably the most structured framework of the Agile methods, Scrum was firstintroduced in the 1986 as a way for “teams to work as a unit to reach a common goal,” according to its inventors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. Scrum takes parts of Traditional and Agile project management ideas, and combines them for a structured yet flexible way to manage projects.

Like Agile, Scrum breaks projects up into tasks that are completable on their own, and then assigns each a “sprint”—two to four-week slots of time dedicated to ship that phase of the project, with daily sprints to ship some part of that phase. It’s that focus on time that makes Scrum a bit more like TPM, bringing more structure to the Agile idea.

scrum

Then, to make sure the project is progressing as expected and meeting goals that may have changed along the way, Scrum requires a reassessment—and potential project changes—at the end of each sprint. It also divides responsibilities into three roles: the Product Owner (PO), the Scrum Master and the Team.

The Product Owner, who should be deeply familiar with all aspects of development, makes sure that everything aligns with business goals and customer needs with a mile-high view of the overall project. The Scrum Master is the team cheerleader—a liaison between the PO and the rest of the team—who makes sure the team is on track in each individual sprint. The Team then is the people working in each sprint, dividing the tasks and making sure everything is shipped.

With all this management and focus on deadlines, Scrum’s main structure revolves around 5 meetings: Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective.

  • Backlog Refinement Meeting (also called “Backlog Grooming”): This meeting is much like the planning phase of TPM, and is held on day one of each sprint—you’ll look over the tasks left in the project, things left behind from previous sprints, and will decide what to focus on. The PO makes the call on how to prioritize tasks, and this ultimately determines how efficient the sprints are.
  • Sprint Planning Meeting: Once the PO decides what to focus on, this meeting helps the team understand what they’ll be building and why. You could share “user stories,” describing features from the customer’s point of view, or could simply divide tasks for each team to work on during the sprint.
  • Daily Scrum Meetings: Simple daily meetings that should only last about 15 minutes, Scrum meetings are a way for team members to update each other on progress. This meeting is not the time or place to air issues—those will go to the Scrum master outside of the daily meetings—but instead is a place to keep the ball rolling.
  • Sprint Review: Since a potentially shippable item is expected at the end of each sprint, the Scrum framework naturally places an emphasis on review. Team members will present what they’ve completed to all stakeholders. While this meeting pushes accountability, its goal is to make sure that the sprint’s completed items match up with business and user goals.
  • Sprint Retrospective: Held immediately after the sprint review meeting, the Sprint retrospective is full of collaborative feedback. Looking at successes and hold ups, everyone decides what is working (what they should continue doing) and what isn’t working (what they should stop doing). This should inspire the focus of the next sprint.

Where other project management systems might look like they simplify your projects and make them seem more manageable, Scrum can at first glance look overwhelming. You’ll need to delegate responsibilities and plan extra meetings—but that overhead can help ensure your projects are successful and stay on track. It’s a structured way to make sure everything gets done.

scrum strengths

SCRUM STRENGTHS

Scrum is designed for projects that need parts of the project shipped quickly, while still making it easy to respond to change during the development process. With so many meetings and ways to delegate tasks, it’s also great to use when parts of the team may not be as familiar with a product’s context (i.e. developers from different industry backgrounds working on a system for the financial sector). You’ll always have someone looking out for the project as a whole, so if each person on the team doesn’t understand the entire project, that’s OK.

Netflix is a great example of Scrum’s ability to help you ship fast. It updates its website every two weeks, and Scrum was a good match because it stresses the user experience, eliminates what doesn’t work, and leaves a small window of time to get things done.

For each site iteration, the designers would test new features, forget the ones that didn’t work out and move on to new functionalities. Most of the benefits the Netflix team saw with Scrum was the ability to “fail fast.” As opposed to launching one massive redesign with many components, their bi-weekly incremental design changes were easy to track; if something went awry, they knew exactly what it was tied to—and could fix it, fast.

scrum weaknesses

SCRUM WEAKNESSES

Like Netflix, you may experience downfalls of Scrum, such as upset designers who saw their beloved work chucked after testing showed it didn’t work—especially when the testing comes so quickly and some may feel that the new ideas would work with more time. You might also have trouble adjusting if your team is accustomed to long release cycles—or, depending on your work, you might find shipping so often isn’t necessary.

Scrum’s meetings and management overhead can also be overkill for some projects, turning into something where you’re more focused on planning sprints than you are on actually getting work accomplished during them.

Lean

Agile project management dictates that you break your work up into smaller, shippable portions, but it doesn’t say much about how to manage each of those portions of your project. Scrum tries to fix that with managers and meetings; Lean, on the other hand, adds workflow processes to Agile so you can ensure every part of your project is shipped with the same quality.

With Lean project management, you’ll still break up your project into smaller pieces of work that can be completed individually. You’ll also define a workflow for each task, something that’s reminiscent of the Apollo project and its five box system. Perhaps you’ll have a planning, design, production, testing, and shipping phase—or any other workflow of phases that you need for your task. Cooking a meal might need a preparation and cooking step, while a writing workflow might need an editing and fact-checking step.

lean

Lean’s stages and their flexibility make it a great system for making sure each part of your project is done well. It doesn’t have Scrum’s strict deadlines, or force you to work on one thing at a time as TPM does—in fact, you could have various tasks in various phases of your Lean workflow at the same time. What it does do is let you build a system tailored to your team.

Just like Agile, Lean is more of a concept than a set-in-stone project management system. You can use the Lean ideas, and build the system you need for your projects.

lean strengths

LEAN STRENGTHS

If you liked the idea of Agile, but wanted a way to make sure each part of your work is consistently finished with the same level of quality and oversight, Lean gives you the extra tools you need to make that happen. It’s still flexible—you can define the stages of your project portions as you want—but there’s enough structure to make your projects a bit more guided.

lean weaknesses

LEAN WEAKNESSES

Every part of your project doesn’t necessarily need the same level of oversight or the same steps for completion, but lean treats everything the same. That can be one major downfall in using it to manage projects with diverse parts that all need completed.

Lean also doesn’t have any process to make sure the final project is completed, making it easy as it is with Lean to let your projects drag on forever. It’s again something communication can clear up, but it is worth keeping in mind.

Why Project Management? & History

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Why Project Management?

Dr. George E. Mueller presenting the Apollo program to President John F. Kennedy on November 15, 1963

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s names will forever symbolize one of humanity’s greatest achievements: putting a human on the moon. Yet, withover 400,000 NASA employees and 20,000 companies and universities working together on the Apollo missions, the people who managed the project may have been the most crucial to actually landing on the moon.

In 1961, President Kennedy committed to putting a man on the moon—and bring him back safely—within a decade, when NASA had only ever sent an astronaut to space for 15 minutes. Such a staggeringly complex project necessitated an incredible amount of resources, teamwork, innovation, and planning. Do each part at random, and it’d never get finished.

As recounted in NASA’s “Managing the Moon Program,” the problem wasn’t so much what to do, as much as it was how to do so much in so little time. “We knew what had to be done,” recounted Dr. Max Faget, head of engineering at Johnson Space Center. “How to do it in 10 years was never addressed before the announcement was made. But quite simply, we considered a program of a number of phases.”

What mattered, then, was accelerating each phase and making sure the various teams and companies working on each part of the project could collaborate effectively, delivering finished work in a timely manner. That task fell to Dr. George E. Muller, who managed every part of the Apollo project from the White House to the smallest supplier. To ensure all phases worked perfectly, he broke each down into five areas: Program Control, System Engineering, Testing, Reliability & Quality, and Flight Operations.

GEM boxes

This five box system—called GEM boxes after Muller’s initials—was designed “to focus, early on in the program, on the fact that you were going to test things, and you ought to design so you can test them,” said Muller. Program Control described what was needed, managed the budget and requirements, and specified how each piece worked together. System Engineering designed new items, Testing made sure it worked, Reliability & Quality made sure each item was up-to-spec, and Flight Operations ensured it’d work in flight.

“When people were first confronted with your approach to things, like all-up testing and management of the systems level, there was an initial skepticism that that was the right way to do business,” recalled Dr. John Logsdon of the feelings when Muller’s project management plan was introduced. But it proved itself out.

As Dr. Muller said, “the amount of time it took to convince people that that was, in fact, a good thing to do, and, in my view at least, was necessary in order to provide the kinds of communications that were required in that complex a program in order to be sure that all those interfaces worked.”

Muller’s project management system was a resounding success. NASA put the first humans on the moon and brought them back to earth safely in less than a decade of Kennedy’s announcement. That was only possible by breaking down the enormous project into manageable, repeatable steps, ones that guaranteed success even when working with so many individuals and companies. It was a project management system—and teamwork—that won the space race.

A Quick History of Project Management

Project Management wasn’t new to NASA and Dr. Muller; Egypt’s pyramids and the Great Wall of China showcase the results of project management from bygone millennia. There’s little documentation of early project management methods, and today’s project management methods are descended from ideas from the past century.

The most obvious way to break a project down is by its phases or tasks. Take cooking a recipe, for instance: you purchase the ingredients, combine them correctly, cook them, and then serve your finished meal. A simple project management method would be to list each step and check it off as it’s completed—a simple to-do list, perhaps, would suffice.

Maybe you’d want to cook multiple dishes—perhaps you’ll make a salad (with just three steps since it doesn’t need to be cooked) and a dessert (with just one step since it’s pre-made). You’ll need to serve each dish on time, and still make sure everything gets done. Suddenly, you’ll need a more powerful project management system, one that lines up the time needed for each task with the time each task is supposed to be completed.


That’s where one of the first modern project management tools—the Gantt chart—comes into play.

Gantt Chart

A list of tasks along with a Gantt Chart calendar, made with Smartsheet

Invented independently by Korol Adamiecki and Henry Gantt in the early 20th century, the Gantt chart lists a project schedule based on start and finish dates. You list how long a task takes, and if any other tasks have to be completed before that task can start—for instance, you can’t serve your meal before you’ve cooked it. You can then calculate the “critical path” of the activities that must be completed by certain dates, and estimate how long the total project will take.

Traditional project management looks a lot like this dinner project, only with far more tasks and more stringent deadlines and carefully planned resources. A project with tight deadlines might use a Gantt chart to decide when to start tasks; a project where resources are more constrained (say, a dinner project where two different dishes need the oven at different temperatures) might use an event chain diagram—much the same as a Gantt chart, but focused on the usage of resources other than time.

Some projects need more or less structure than traditional project management gives you. If you’re publishing a series of articles on a blog, specific deadlines might not be as helpful as a process where you plan each article, write the first draft, get early edits and feedback, finish the article, proofread it, and then publish it. Instead of managing time or resources, you’ll manage process, running every task through the same checklist or workflow.

It’s for projects like these that Agile project management and its many offshoots—Lean, Kanban, and more—have been developed, to help you make a process to produce consistent work. Some projects need to add more dates and resource allocation back into an agile workflow, so more advanced techniques like Six Sigma and Scrum have been developed as well.

How Can Better Project Management Affect Your Business?

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT ARTICLES

How Can Better Project Management Affect Your Business?
BY DEFTSOFT · APRIL 16, 2016

If a business is a living body and research is its heart, projects can be interpreted as energy sources. A whole enterprise is woven around gathering projects, completing them on time using presented methodologies and using proceeds from those projects to trail our research after paying off employees.

Project management is a key proficiency to master in a business. Whether you are a self employed entrepreneur or a hard working combatant of an enterprise, efficient project management vitalizes business. It ensures that energy of the entire personnel assigned to that specific undertaking is channelized in a precise direction.

Einstein’s theory of relativity proved how time and space are related to each other. In business too, time and human resources are limited and related to each other. Human resources of an organization are bound with the firm for a specific frame of time. Proper project management can result in efficient operation of their skills. This would lead to more plundering of profits and income generation for business.

A suitable project management ensures that less cash burning happens on behalf of more revenue generation. This creates a better return on investment made in human resources and tangible assets. Better project management affects business in two traditions as mentioned:

Short Term Benefits

Managing and leading a project in right direction ensures its well-timed completion. It enables you to embark on more projects and more complex projects hence resulting in skyrocketing profit generation for the company.

While taking up a project we compute cost of all concrete and insubstantial resources utilized to complete the venture. Based on total cost and adding of earnings, we quote the price of project. While subscriptions to software as well as employees costs compensation, an efficient project management ensures that our profits are roughly as we projected.

Long Term Benefits

If your corporation is a small to medium level outsourcing based company, chances are that projects are acquired via online profiles and bidding. While timely completion of a project makes an exceptional reputation on public profiles, it has its lingering benefits too. Client retention starts to happen as a customer whose project was completed timely will surely fancy more of his projects prepared by you.

Apart from retaining a client, more projects will start to come in, further accelerating the business expansion. Time and excellence oriented customers will start getting inclined to get their projects done from you. This will increase quality of projects generating more revenue and providing more experience.

Just like organic linking makes a website popular, real customer’s reference to probable customers will further increase market credibility. More projects will flow in because of customer testimonials affecting the business optimistically.

It has been asserted from an extended time that “A happy customer is the best salesman”. Better project management’s ultimate goal is customer satisfaction and Organization’s profit. Effect of better project management on business is exactly like effect of servicing on a car: Excellent ROI, smooth operation and customer satisfaction.

How to Make Project Management Easier for Many Projects

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How to Make Project Management Easier for Many Projects
BY ANDREW MAKAR · MARCH 26, 2016

Many people are entrusted with the title of “project manager” often regardless of whether they are interested in the role. There is an entire industry aimed at the project management profession with hundreds of thousands of certified project management professionals, yet projects get delivered every day with and without certified project managers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m Project Management Professional (PMP) certified and actually enjoy a healthy discussion on proper project management processes. However, project management doesn’t have to be overly complex or intimidating as described in project management textbooks (it can be as simple as the process presented in a guide such as: The Six Step Guide to Practical Project Management).

You need the right tools and processes

One of the best executives I ever met prided himself on not having PMP certification, yet he was responsible for his organisation’s enterprise programs and projects. He acknowledged that project management processes, tools and techniques were important, but just as vital are communication and common sense.

He trusted his team to pick the right tool for the job and adjust the processes to meet the project needs. People don’t have time today for overly complex processes producing reams of documentation and checklists. They need to deliver projects not paperwork.

Simplicity grows in importance as work grows

Project managers are also expected to manage multiple projects at once. As more projects are added to a person’s workload, the need for simplified project management processes increases.

Project management office organisations try to improve project delivery by adding a common project portfolio management tool throughout the organisation. Although these tools provide top-down visibility into a project’s performance, these tools can add to the project manager’s administrative burden. When a complex project management tool is introduced, the project manager risks spending more time administering the tool than actually managing the project.

I’ve seen this first hand when running a project with more than 100 resources from many different resource pools. I spent more time ensuring resource needs were forecasted and conflicts resolved than helping to resolve project issues.

You need a flexible tool

If the project management tool you use isn’t flexible with scheduling, the project manager can spend hours if not days trying to tweak the schedule to fit the project management tool constraints.

For one project, I spent more time allocating project team resources to high-level tasks in a meaningless project schedule just so everyone could record time. I maintained a separate schedule for all the real projects tasks, but needed to do duplicate administration in a separate system.

Project management just doesn’t have to be this hard. It is really quite simple. Processes and tools are always added with good intentions but project managers need to pick the right tool and the right process for the job.

Simple steps for most projects

Complex projects will require more processes and tools. However, many projects can be delivered following a simple series of steps.

Every project needs to answer several key questions including:

Why are we doing this project?
What is the end goal?
Who needs to be involved?
What needs to be done to achieve the goal?
When and how will it be done?
Depending on the project’s complexity, the answers to these questions could be a simple presentation or a 50-page project charter that few will ever read. I remember working on one project where the running joke was the project had launched yet the project charter was “almost ready to be signed”.

It consisted of a 45-page Word document that no one would ever read in great detail or even sign off. The project still delivered on time and was successful. This example begs the question – was all that process really needed?

PROJECTS – Late And Over-Budget? A Method To Avoid Project Management Disasters

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Late And Over-Budget? A Method To Avoid Project Management Disasters

IESE Business School ,   CONTRIBUTOR
Global management & economic experts share their insights & research. 

From a project management perspective, the construction of the Channel Tunnel between France and Britain is a classic failure. That is the only way to describe a project that ended up costing more than twice the amount budgeted and years behind schedule.

The problem that sinks many projects, like this one, is the lack of an efficient project management methodology.

Applying a methodology allows for taking advantage of what has been learned in other, similar cases and provides opportunities for improvement in the future. It also optimizes coordination among departments and enhances communication, which facilitates project follow-up.

The Life Cycle of a Project

Regardless of how complex they are, all projects go through five phases.

1. Selection. In this preliminary phase, one must weigh the various options and give priority to projects with the greatest impact, for example, in terms of strategy implementation, and always keeping in mind what resources are available.

This provides a first checkpoint. It is advisable to set up other checkpoints throughout the various phases of the project. In this way, the project can be cancelled or halted quickly if complications arise and efforts need to be redirected elsewhere.

2. Defining. What are you trying to achieve, why are you doing it, how are you going to carry it out, who are the critical stakeholders, what external conditions or factors are needed for the project to succeed, and how will you measure success? Answering these questions will determine if the project has a clear mandate and will define the team needed to get the ball rolling. The project definition can become a sort of a project contract.

At this stage it is essential to identify the uncertainties (which are dealt with through buffers to absorb possible variations) and risks (through backup plans) associated with any project.

3. Planning. This is a matter of spelling out how, when and who. These are the most important tasks:

• breaking the project down into manageable pieces

• coming up with a quality control plan

• creating a diagram that illustrates the interdependence of the different project activities

• estimating the duration, cost and resources necessary for each task

• planning a critical chain that will determine the total duration of the project

• preparing detailed budgets and plans

• establishing milestones that will serve as points at which to stop and take stock of how the project is proceeding

Depending on the level of knowledge, it is a good idea to distinguish between a deployment project, which allows for detailed planning before the project is executed, and iterative projects, in which only the overall structure is planned and the details are defined as the project moves along (sometimes using alternative methodologies like Scrum).

4. Execution & Monitoring. Resources must be appropriately assigned to tasks, considering the interdependencies, so that they can be carried out on schedule. It is also recommended to hold status meetings periodically to anticipate issues.

The goal of monitoring is to detect schedule, cost or specification deviations in time to react. To do this, there are several aggregate methods, such as monitoring the use of time or budget buffers, the earned value and burn down charts, or more specific ones such as Gantt or milestone tracking charts.

If variations are detected, one must evaluate them to decide if it is possible to stick with the original plan, if project goals must be changed or if it is better to abandon the project altogether.

5. Finalization. Before considering a project to be complete and move to the next one, a thorough review of the results should be done and compared with the previously agreed goals. It is best to summarize the lessons learned as soon as possible, organizing them systematically so as to share them with others and use them in future projects.

It is also a good idea to celebrate a project’s completion, as this serves as motivation for all involved.

Breaking Molds

Just because certain kinds of projects are managed in a traditional way does not mean this is the best way. Sometimes it is possible to achieve substantial improvements with alternative approaches.

For instance, when projects are assigned through tenders in which the lowest-cost bid wins, many projects end up failing to satisfy the agreed specs and need revisions that ultimately cost much more than what was initially agreed.

To avoid this, in the construction of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport in London, for example, a novel approach (at that time) was used: a cost-plus-incentive fee contract.

As the client kept the overall responsibility for the project, and committed to paying the builder its costs plus a share of profits, an incentive was created for both of them to work together on innovative solutions that improved features, lowered costs and got the work done faster.

This approach generated value for all parties involved and averted confrontations.

However, in this particular case, the success of this construction was hindered by incredible problems in the opening of the completed terminal.

Not a Penny More

In order to eliminate slouching or wasteful spending, it is necessary to determine which parts of the project:

• add value

• are necessary but do not add value

• are not necessary and do not add value

• create waiting time

For instance, in preparing an afternoon snack, buying sandwiches adds value, going to the store for ingredients is necessary but does not add value, wrapping up the sandwiches at the store and unwrapping them at home may not be necessary nor add value, and waiting for a call confirming which sandwiches are to be purchased involves needless downtime if planning has been done properly.

Figure out what to do to eliminate the last two activities, minimize necessary but non-value-adding activities and maximize value-adding ones.

Project Management Culture

The true key to managing projects successfully in a consistent and sustainable way is to develop a project management culture.

Make methodical management a corporate mind-set, and ensure that all stakeholders are aware of the benefits of that mentality in terms of optimizing the use of resources.

By Philip Moscoso, Eurest Chair of Excellence in Services at IESE Business School , and Jaume Ribera Segura, IESE Business School Professor of Operations, Production, Technology Management.
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