PoddarCo

Some questions to ask of yourself and your project/program office as you evaluate your organizations project management practices:

• How do we ensure that we develop and deliver successful products by the end of our projects?

• Does our methodology allow us to accurately capture requirements and effectively manage the project against those requirements?

• How can we deploy projects more quickly, avoiding overruns and poor performance, and for better value, lower cost and better functionality?

• Where can we build greater flexibility in our policies and procedures? What kind of project thresholds may add value in our environment (example: if the project is under $250,000 it is not subject to the same rules and restrictions as a $1 million project)?

We practiced a technique to write user stories that is worth sharing. Some of the ideas are similar to those mentioned in “The Art of Writing Use Cases”.

To get to a good user story, the following template was suggested:

AS A ___________ (leads you to think from a user perspective, identify multiple user profiles, etc.)
I WANT TO ___________ (leads to the required functionality)
SO THAT __________ (leads to the business value, desired outcome)

NEXT, layer this user story with specific ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA (the acronym SMART or INVEST may ring a bell). The acceptance criteria guide development, unit testing and writing of detailed use cases as well as test cases.

Illustrating this point with a simplified example from an actual project -
AS A story editor
I WANT TO be able to quickly search through multiple stories and filter them based on whether they are published, in-progress, internal documents, part of my contents or part of my workgroups
SO THAT I can focus more time on editing and reviewing the story rather than locating it

AC-1: Search results should load within 5 seconds
AC-2: Should be able to select multiple filters, example – published and my contents
AC-3: Search and Filters should be easily accessible as options from any screen on the application
AC-4…etc…

This approach communicates the big picture and acceptance criteria which may prove useful when working with virtual teams. However, writing these stories is only the starting point in requirements capture, and can be fairly time consuming depending on the needs of a project. It is even more helpful if you start assigning story points but talking about that would take this blog entry on a tangent, hence shutting up now…

In February 2010 I attended a Scrum training course in NYC. Because of a snow storm, I only attended the first day of the two day training. While attending both days may have led to advanced insights, my day-1 experience was below expectations.

Training Offered By: Danube Technologies (now CollabNet, Inc.)
Instructor: Lyssa Adkins

Scrum Training Review - February 2010

Click here for a more detailed review of this training course with Lyssa Adkins

In April 2010, I attended the full two day training. This training was better than the one I attended in February, but I still have open questions on how to effectively implement scrum in certain environments. The detailed review here lists few open questions.

Training Offered By: Danube Technologies (now CollabNet, Inc.)
Instructor: Tamara Sulaiman

Scrum Training Review - April 2010

Click here for a more detailed review of this training course with Tamara Sulaiman

If you are looking for more than basic framework knowledge, take a course with one of the pioneers of scrum instead of going through software vendors that provide training services. I haven’t attended a course with other trainers, but based on discussions with several scrum masters, some good trainers to consider are: Jeff Sutherland, Sanjiv Augustine, Alistair Cockburn, Ken Schwaber, Mike Cohn, Esther Derby, Michele Sliger.

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Training Offered By: Danube Technologies (now CollabNet, Inc.)
Instructor: Tamara Sulaiman

When I first attended the scrum master course in February 2010, I could not attend the second day because of a snow storm. So I re-attended the two day training in April 2010. Overall, this training session was better than the one I attended in February. The instructor’s approach made a big difference (although the breakfast was a huge disappointment). The instructor started with a quick pulse on the attendees’ familiarity with scrum, effectively tying that to expectations one should have from the course (i.e. the course’s focus is on the basics of everything scrum, so don’t expect to get a solution to your complex scenarios).

The instructor did not spend time on evangelizing scrum or belittling waterfall and other methodologies. I particularly liked the instructor’s approach of using scrum to teach scrum. The instructor had prepared a product backlog of items that the team needed to get through in two days of training. She had assigned story points to each item, and moved stories from In-Progress to Done as we went through them. She even tracked work done and work left on a burn-down chart. For those who had never used scrum, this mode of teaching made it easier to see scrum in application. For those who had used scrum, it helped to see scrum functioning in a different setting.

The instructor had also set up a group exercise in which each team had to build a game using the fundamentals of scrum. This exercise was effective in experiencing firsthand the responsibilities of the product owner and scrum master. It also helped to create user stories, assign story points, play planning poker, assign priorities, track work on burn down charts, conduct product demos – all in actual time boxes as part of the game creation exercise. However, as beneficial as this exercise was, it also detracted attention from more pressing discussions. It would have helped to de-scope this exercise and simplify the goal so teams could see the same benefits in less time.

In conclusion, while I left more satisfied with the tips and tools picked up in these two days of training, I still had the same outstanding concerns as earlier – how to make scrum implementations work productively in matrix organizations where shared resources and distributed teams are the norm? How to get scrum masters to efficiently lead multiple scrum teams? How to measure effectiveness of scrum methods and performance of scrum masters?

Related Posts

• A detailed review of a scrum master course (Through CollabNet with Lyssa Adkins in February 2010)
• A summarized review of two scrum master courses: (1) With Lyssa Adkins in February 2010 and (2) With Tamara Sulaiman in April 2010

Summarizing Observations

Scrum Training Review - April 2010

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Training Offered By: Danube Technologies (now CollabNet, Inc.)
Instructor: Lyssa Adkins

In February 2010 I attended a scrum training class as I was keen to learn some new tricks and get the scrum master certification. While I certainly picked up at least two valuable exercises to use in my client engagements in just one day, a fair portion of the training was below satisfactory. I have been a scrum practitioner for almost five years, so maybe some of the material and insights were very rudimentary. Regardless of my level of familiarity with scrum, the training felt lacking in actionable insights that one could take back to the work place.

At times, it seemed as if some attendees were perceiving scrum to be less adaptive as the instructor often stressed the need to implement all of scrum’s rules for it to be effective. Many people were in this course because they believed in scrum’s merits and wanted to understand how to make it work in their environment. If the instructor did not spend so much energy on evangelizing scrum over alternate methodologies, but more energy on sharing lessons learned and actionable insights from implementing scrum in various organizations, the training would have been much more valuable.

For instance, the instructor mentioned that scrum is highly effective (optimal) only when fully functional teams are face-to-face. She highlighted that anything else is a coping strategy that will lead to minor benefits. Instead, it would have helped if she dived into some of the challenges of implementing scrum on a globally diversified team. With the increase in outsourcing and globalization, it’s not always viable to collocate one’s entire team. Even if scrum implementations will be sub-optimal for such teams, what can they do to get maximum value from scrum?

Another statement the instructor made was “A good scrum master can be the leader of three teams; a great scrum master can be the leader of one team”. In today’s lean and mean economy very few companies, if any, can afford the luxury of having one person dedicated to leading one project. Leading several projects, juggling multiple priorities and wearing many hats is a given. So instead of rejecting this view, it would have helped to understand what are some strategies scrum masters can build into their approach to be super stars even while managing multiple teams.

Because of a snow storm, I only attended day one of the two day training. While attending both days may have led to more advanced insights, my day-1 experience was below expectations.

Related Posts

• A detailed review of a scrum master course (Through CollabNet with Tamara Sulaiman in April 2010)
• A summarized review of two scrum master courses: (1) With Lyssa Adkins in February 2010 and (2) With Tamara Sulaiman in April 2010

Summarizing Observations

Scrum Training Review - February 2010

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Just sharing a thought I came across while reading a book on organizational culture and change management.

Have you ever been in meetings that you came out of and said “That was total BS”? Ever wondered why you couldn’t say that during those meetings instead of after?

Think about your team and organization’s culture. Try to promote an environment of openness and collaboration. It is important that the project manager be the agent that fosters strong team spirit across departments, functional units and geographies. While you may not always have the authority to influence an enterprise wide culture shift, you could start with your project team…

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Just couple weeks back, I was talking to a PMO Director at a large media and publishing company – we were discussing how to improve the quality of project plans put together by her team. One point she mentioned in our conversation was that of relevance. It is a simple yet extremely important concept, hence sharing it here.

She said that good, experienced PMs soon develop a knack for realizing which aspects of a project plan are important or relevant to the project at hand. For example, not all projects need detailed communication plans, stakeholder registers or extremely detailed project schedules. To manage one’s workload efficiently it is important for the PM to realize what applies and adds value to the project, and produce those components of the plan accordingly.

It is a simple thought but often overlooked. Click here to read a related post on what we identified as core things to look for in a basic project schedule

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Just sharing some interesting posts I came across in the past week -

Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd at Harvard Business Review Blogs

Redefining Project Success by Kailash Awati at Eight to Late

The Absolute Worst Way To Plan A Project by Glen B. Alleman at Herding Cats

ITIL®: A Project Manager’s Perspective by Erika Flora at pmstudent

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Recently, I was working with a PMO Director on improving the quality of her team’s project schedules (built using MS Project). Note that these schedules were fairly basic, so we are not talking about complex cost tracking, WBS linkage and resource leveling. At this point, the goal was just to identify the most critical pieces to capture on a project schedule given this company’s structure and operations. Working in conjunction with other project managers on her team, we identified the following as critical components that even the most basic schedule should reflect:

1. Have adequate coverage of all activities and milestones critical to the project (see note below regarding what level to track at)
2. For each activity, clearly capture estimated duration and effort. In this organization getting an accurate indication of effort was quite challenging, so duration was used more often. While this presents some resource management challenges, it was an acceptable approach given the realities of the organization.
3. It is also important to indicate the dependencies / predecessors so all activities and milestones are clearly linked to each other. This not only makes it easier to administer changes to the plan but also to assess impact of any slippage very quickly.
4. For all activities identify the resource accountable for the activity’s completion. Dependent on how you do this, and how you set up other linkages in the MS Project file, assigning resources can also help you in estimating costs, in preparing budgets and in resource leveling.

One can do a lot more with MS Project, but we identified these as the most basic requirements given the organization’s and the project team’s needs.

Another important point underlying all this was the level at which to track activities in the project schedule. This depends on the needs of the project – some projects warrant detailed task level tracking, while for others, tracking by deliverables/milestones works just as well. The level at which you track is also a function of which methodology your organization is using as the rules of the game may differ. Although, the gist of it stays the same – what needs to be done, how long will it take, what are the dependencies, who is accountable.

Related posts that you might want to browse through -

• Managing Projects – by tasks or by deliverables and milestones

• Relevance as a skill for PMs

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Just sharing a video about the L2 Generation Next forum / conference that I am considering attending. One of the speakers is the project lead for ‘Text Haiti to 90999′. Many others will be present - http://budurl.com/PriyankaisGenY

If anyone’s attended any of L2′s (Luxury Lab) events before, please share your thoughts.

Click here for more info on the conference

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