In the recent past, there are more companies embracing agility and using scrum in project management to improve stakeholders experience and fix time and cost in an effort to control requirements. This is swimming against the currents of traditional project management which was working towards fixing requirements in an effort to control time and cost. Working in teams and adapting the scrum way of working increases the capacity of the team, but also improves stakeholder confidence. The project manager is able to collaborate better with the sponsor on the project’s progress. Seen in this image are the different roles and responsibilities in scrum ownership
Normally the process is not comlicated and involves the execution partof project portfolio management. Once the projects vision is defined and the business value that it is expected to meet, the product features are then ranked based on their order of importance. The product owner, will normally maintain these features in the backlog. Normally at this time, the features have not been estimated, but are broken down into small functional units. A joint of the team is then collaborated to select the items from the product backlog which they deem possible to complete in a single sprint. Theses items form the sprint backlog and are part of the sprint-planning meeting. There is no particular fixed period for a sprint but is always advocated that it is better for it to be between 1-4 weeks. Personally, I have experienced that alternating 1 and 3 weeks or 2 and 4 weeks always gives a better rhythm to the team and creates harmony. Towards the last stages of the project, there is always fatigue and members are eager to be done. That is why this swapping helps to keep the team focused.
Getting committed to the sprint backlog, means that the project will now be under lock and the team commences in their work. Any changes that affect scope, schedule, or budget have to be issued through the change request and are only allowed into the product backlog not sprint backlog. In the docurse of sprint development, the team remains updated on each others’ progress, commonly known as daily scrum. When the sprint nears completion, the team gets to present the job done to the stakeholders. It is also the opportunity where the team gets informed about the next sprint and also hold a retrospective meeting to understand how they can improve. It defines an important part of scrum meeting, since these are building phases of the phase gates and will ultimately define the success of the deliverables. It focuses on the three pillars of Scrum: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
As a better practice, organizations should through their governance structures encourage the use of scrum and sprints to execute operational value-add projects for their portfolios, perform due diligence, and institutionalize their value-add capabilities. This helps to create project value visibility and the portfolio manager during their periodical meetings with the project managers, is able to see which projects should be financed further and which ones should be stopped. As the high value projects take the center stage, it reduces the amount of work to be done and helps the team to concetrate better instead of running multiple simultaneous projects. Consequently, this gives birth to increased productivity and better adaptation to project management optimization.
To communicate progress and provide frequent status updates, agile uses sprint burndowns and release burndowns, task boards, backlogs, sprint plans, release plans and other metric charts. As PMBOK states, the only artifacts required by scrum are the product backlog, sprint backlog, release burndown, and sprint burndown. All other forms of documentation are left up to the team to decide. Agile’s rule of thumb is that if the artifact adds value and the customer is willing to pay for it, then the artifact should be created. Artifacts created because “it’s on the checklist” or “we’ve always done this” are items that should be considered for elimination. Documents required for governance issues (audits, accounting, etc.) must still be created, but often can be streamlined.
So, what approaches does your team use in executing projects? Kindly share in the comments.
Project Management 