Agile or Fragile?

Many IT project managers I know are asking this question: How do Agile and SCRUM methodologies square with “traditional” PMIBOK practice? And as a side topic – how will PMI adapt this, because Agile and SCRUM are being used in the “real world” and fighting it as a traditionalist project manager can make you irrelevant in a hurry.

The second issue is how this gets applied in high-volume transactional systems where, in essence, you can’t take a chance on dropping a transaction or fouling a transaction with a minor XML schema change.

I am assuming that most practicioners of these methodologies are either not in high-volume financial and transactional environments (and subject to very strict audit requirments for change management) or are doing this development on test systems that emulate the production systems. Not on a live production environment. This is never stated explicitly,

This second point is important in the transactional world because it can be very costly (even with virtualization) to emulate the production environment in the development/QA environment to the degree that “believable” load testing (along with rapid full and partial regression testing in the final acceptance stage) can be done. It’s an issue I’ve had to grapple with more than once as applications that flew through a short, but highly iterative cycle blew sky-high in production. Customer loved it in beta and wanted to kill us after we hit production and then had to roll back to a prior version. Problems were fixed within hours, but banks and trading firms have extremely low tolerance for failed transactions or slow confirmation reporting (or even having their logo dropped from the website, etc., etc.).

As for XP – If you have the headcount, do it (or at least try it). I love it, but it has its cost and productivity implications. It’s been very difficult to justify the “apparent” drop in productivity per engineer in a straight line to the better designs that have less initial defects that XP can achieve. There are also the “personal space” issues that sometimes require changes to the physical office environment. Anyone had experience with “pods” where the cubicles or workspaces were arranged in a fashion with the engineers facing “into” their cubicles, but able to swing around to a “meeting area” at the center when it came time to do their shared work?

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

What are some of the characteristics of a successful project?

• On time
• On budget
• Within scope
• Major risks mitigated and retired

Well, they all are. But here’s one characteristic that you might not appreciate:

• On most successful projects, the project manager is nearly invisible once the project is closed out. Or, worse, the project manager is the most visible team member when things go awry.

Sad, but true. You write a great charter and scope document, clearly identify and mitigate the major risks, pull the team together, keep everybody focused, communicate on a timely basis with project stakeholders and the next thing you know, there’s an email from the division VP thanking the Sales team, the Development team, the Operations team, the Customer Service team and the guy who refills the vending machine with Red Bull.

But not a peep about the project manager. Amazing how all of these people across all of those departments managed to just come together on their own to get this complex project done, isn’t it?

PART ONE

What’s a project manager to do?

Ask yourself a few questions:

• How good of a communicator am I? Or, more importantly, how good a job are you doing at marketing your successes?
  
  If all you’re doing is communicating across the project team, you’re missing something important. What if your project sponsor is not be your strongest promoter? What about his/her boss? Does that person know you exist? Expand your distribution list for status reports so that EVERYONE knows that you’re one of the key people pushing the ball upfield.When you send out your status reports, don’t forget to include yourself when listing the key team members on the project (which you should do on every formal project communication (i.e. status reports, exception reports, change board submissions, etc.)

More to come….

Get on board with Portfolio Management

Here’s something to go with your morning coffee:

IT budgets are shrinking, while performance and productivity demands are greater than ever.

The failure rate for IT projects averages 70%[1].

Outsourcing used to be “the answer” but now it’s the “question.”

Not great news.

These are the questions executive management needs IT departments to answer now:

• Which projects are performing to expectations? Is today’s positive ROI tomorrow’s NFV nightmare?
• Which projects are on time and in budget?
• Are they still in alignment with strategic business objectives?
• Which projects are at risk of failure and what are the potential trouble spots?
• Are project resources properly balanced and allocated?

If the answers to all of these questions are not available, IT management may not be getting the information and control needed in order to manage as effectively as possible. And that’s not good news either.

The pressure is on, the questions are real and the answers are not easy to find because they can change from week to week.

The ability to manage all projects as one unified, dynamic portfolio – instantly visualizing project performance, risk analysis and business alignment – is critical to any IT department’s success in today’s high-pressure business environment.

Can you tell the players without a Balanced Scorecard? A project can’t be fixed at its conclusion. But with continuous observation, measurement and timely intervention, many problems that are not evident at the outset during the initial planning phase can be identified and corrected while the project is in process.

Strategic Business Alignment Check

• Are your current projects going with the flow or fighting it? Customer and internal business needs can be fluid in today’s high-speed economy. Changing requirements can obsolete a project almost overnight. Your communications process must put you, your customers, your project sponsors and budget owners on the same track and make sure that your projects stay there.

Scope Check

• One of the most common causes of project failure is the “just one more thing” or “nice-to-have” feature that stretches resources, schedules and cost over the limit. Completing a project late with bloated scope can often mean that the operation is a success but the patient doesn’t survive. A project scope “diet plan” is often the only way to make sure that “just enough” is good enough and soon enough.

Project Metric Analysis & Implementation

• How do you measure success? You can’t wait until the project is nearing completion before you know how healthy it is. The best-planned projects undergo change. In fact, change is the only constant in many business and project environments. Explore the Six Sigma concepts – Design, Measure, Analyze, Inspect, Control – and integrate them into your project planning and management methodology.

Cross-project Resource Alignment Measurement

• Are your resources properly deployed? Obsolete resource management methodologies can idle some resources while others are over-committed. Scarce and costly IT resources should be made available as needed to all projects and not placed into dedicated departmental silos. A resource management plan is essential to portfolio management success.

Current and Future Cost Analysis

• Everything is negotiable. If budget contraction threatens your projects, how quickly can you identify lower-cost alternatives to key project elements while improving processing capacity, network performance and reducing architectural complexity and cost?

[1] InfoWorld

Staying afloat when your company is sinking

Revenues Declining!

Margins Evaporating!!

Lions and Tigers and Bears – Oh My!!!

Yes, it’s a tough time for many businesses. Many are on the same economic roller coaster as the global economy. An analyst downgrades your company. The stock price fluctuates. Cost-cutting cancels some projects and friends are laid off.

What to do?

Focus. No matter what your job is, you need to show up every day and do it. Block out rumors and negativism. Walk away from hallway discussions about “how bad things are” or “how good things used to be.” It’s not about being oblivious to problems. They’re real. But don’t contribute to making things worse by lowering your productivity or that of your co-workers by losing focus on the important work you have to get done for that day.

Organize. Plan your day. Prioritize your tasks and get at least one really important thing done before lunch each day. Set up your calendar for the remainder of the week, scheduling the high-priority tasks for the morning when your energy is high and the long-term and “easy” stuff for the latter portion of the day.

Communicate. Pay attention to how you communicate. If the risk management slide has been creeping too far forward in your presentations, consider putting the “Accomplished Milestones” page ahead of it again. Nothing wrong with communicating the successful aspects of any project you’re involved with. Examine your wording. A lot can be said (and inferred) with your choice of wording. Compare these two statements:

“The project faces continuing schedule challenges due to the reduction of resources in the QA department.”

“The project team has adopted peer code review and more frequent walkthroughs to offset the reduction of resources in the QA department.”

Both statements convey the same problem but the second one also demonstrates that the team (under your masterful leadership) has adapted to and is overcoming the QA resource shortage. As a manager, which statement would make you feel better about the person managing that project?

Lead. You don’t need to be a CEO, Vice President or Director to be a leader. You can lead by example by maintaining the quality and timeliness of your work. You can lead by projecting a positive attitude. You can lead by helping others focus on “doing” instead of “blaming.” You can remember to smile when you pass colleagues in the hallway. You can take the team to lunch. Pay for it on your own dime if you have to – let them know that you value their efforts.

Stay Calm. Heed the lesson of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the USAir pilot who landed his powerless Airbus jet in New York’s Hudson River after losing both engines shortly after takeoff. Imagine what it felt like to hold your own life and 154 others in your hands, knowing that only your skill, experience, leadership and staying calm and focused will save the day.

Your job may not involve life and death decisions, but how well you perform on a daily basis in the face of adversity will determine how strongly you are valued by your peers and managers and how likely you are to survive in this uncertain environment.

Must Reading!

You can’t succeed unless you plan to avoid failure. In simple tasks, recognizing and avoiding risk is easy. But what about complex projects that spread over multiple departments, organizations and time zones? Learning how to recognize the potential for failure is critical to planning and executing successful projects. Highly recommended reading.

The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations

 

 

by Dietrich Dorner

(ISBN13: 9780201479485)

Why do we make mistakes? Are there certain errors common to failure, whether in a complex enterprise or daily life? In this truly indispensable book, Dietrich Dörner identifies what he calls the “logic of failure”—certain tendencies in our patterns of thought that, while appropriate to an older, simpler world, prove disastrous for the complex world we live in now. Working with imaginative and often hilarious computer simulations, he analyzes the roots of catastrophe, showing city planners in the very act of creating gridlock and disaster, or public health authorities setting the scene for starvation. The Logic of Failure is a compass for intelligent planning and decision-making that can sharpen the skills of managers, policymakers and everyone involved in the daily challenge of getting from point A to point B.

Why do IT projects fail?

Most of them should never have even gotten started.

How can you tell the losers from the winners?

That’s what we’ll be talking about here.