Bringing Sense, Sensibility, and Sanity to projects.

What they are and what they are not.

WHAT ARE THEY?  Unique Output  Specific Goals  Professional Judgment  Distinctive events  Change Focus  Time Boundaries  Temporary Resources  Distinct and Interdependent  Completion focused  Conscious Constitution WHAT THEY ARE NOT.  Departments  Teams  Committees  Outsourced Individuals or groups

 Exercise #1 Discuss the project pyramid  Exercise #2 What is the most important part of the pyramid for your business.

How work gets done.

 Ad-Hoc  Waterfall  Agile

Hey, can you do me a favor??  Not a formal method  Common sense based  Dialog becomes action  Quick Rework and Patches  Problems with this approach  Lack of Clarity in Sponsorship  Unpredictable schedules and costs  Morphing requirements and project drift  High potential for surprise factor

 Long project durations  Heavy dependency of the creation of documentation.  Lack of flexibility  The project is outdated by the time of delivery.

 Individuals and interactions over processes and tools  Working software over comprehensive documentation  Customer collaboration over contract negotiation  Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Manifesto for Agile Software Development (February 13 th, 2001)

 Ad-hoc and Waterfall approaches to project are not very effective  Change happens so fast in business that you need a faster, better and leaner approach to your projects.  Agile helps you complete projects to meet the above challenges.

The Who, What, When and Where of Agile project mangement

 A collection of features and requirements you need to complete the project.  The Scrum Process  Sprints to transform features and requirements into product  Rapid iterations.  Cyclical in nature.

THE PRODUCT BACKLOG  Customer Feature #1  Internal Feature #1  Customer Feature #2  Bug fix #1  Internal Feature #2  Internal Feature#3  Customer Feature #3 The wish list of what people want done. THE SPRINT BACKLOG  Bug Fix #1  Customer Feature #1  Customer Feature #2  Customer Feature #3 The list of tasks agreed to be completed during the next sprint.

 This is where the work gets done  At the start of each working day there is a Scrum meeting to update the team on the sprint.  Sprints can be as short as a week and as long as four weeks.  Shippable product must be provided at the end of the sprint.  Each Sprint is called an iteration.

The scrum master is the project leader and person who works with IT professionals each day. They keep the project on track, on budget, and with high quality. They should be good with people and have a solid grounding in technology. The Product Owner works with the Scrum Master. They understand the business and customers who use the product. They should be experienced pros who can take vague requirements and turn them into a concrete to do list.

The pigs on the project are the ones who make it a reality. They are the ones who are committed and have the most to loose if the project fails. These are your IT professionals. The Chickens are the ones involved with the project. They don’t have as much invested and their career is not as impacted by project failure. These people can affect the project in both positive and negative ways. These are sales people, marketing professionals, accounting types, and the legal department

 Should start in the IT department for small projects  Expand to bigger projects  Move to other aspects of the business  The entire enterprise should be adopting agile principles.

 Get started right away.  Set small achievable goals and deadlines and meet them.  Soon no project is too big for this approach. When eating an elephant you start one bite at a time. -Creighton Abrams

 Exercise #3 do a project with an agile approach.  Exercise #4 how do you think your business is going to change using this approach.

Things you need to do to make agile work in your business.

 Commitment  Openness  Focus  Respect  Courage

 These values must be agreed upon and out in the open.  Everyone should practice these virtues and not tolerate those who don’t  You must spend more time screening employees to make sure they practice these values.  Average is just not good enough.

Why is all this necessary?

 IBM uses it to develop software  Fits seamlessly with lean management approaches to business.  Software project success rate with Agile is 83% compared with the 24% compared to the chaos study. Scott Ambler July 2008

 No cost to the firm  More responsive to changes in the business climate  Better customer service  A process that both IT professionals support and business leaders can understand.