Mike Cottmeyer's Blog has much to say about managing agile projects in the presence of more traditional project management methods. His post Power Shift presents ideas about simplicity. One item that struck me was
Being agile means you accept input from reality and respond to it.
What a concept - in several ways:
- I have experienced project teams that simply can not come to grips with the reality of the project. "We can make it up in system test," is one mantra. "No problem, we have sufficient margin to recover from this delay," is another. Some of these teams used XP some used full blow EIA-748B Earned Value.
- I have also experience projects teams that work on a weekly forecast of the Estimate at Completion and the Estimate to Complete. Some of these teams used Scrum, some used full blown EIA-748B Earned Value.
From my experience the same goes for PMBOK, Scrum and XP team. We have some clients doing Scrum without a Scrum Master, no burn down charts, no real understanding of Scrum other than to have read a book. We have other clients doing Earned Value, where the ACWP (Actual Cost of Work Performed) - the actuals for the period was copied to the BCWP (Budgeted Cost for Work Performed) - the "earned value." "No problem we must have earned that value, since we spent that value."
The point here, is that what ever processes are used to manage a project - and Scrum and XP are software development methodologies - not project management processes. Although Scrum is closer to PM than XP. What ever the process, the naive or foolish application of that process results in naive AND foolish results.
But back to Mike's comment:
Being agile means you accept input from reality and respond to it.
Accepting input from reality and responding to it? That's almost a definition for survival for anything or any activity in the universe. By definition, NOT receiving input and NOT responding to it creates the basis for being eliminated from the gene pool.
Why do project teams not receive input and not respond to this input?
This is one of those clinical Psychology discussions where I'm out of my league. Our firm's Organizational Development practice director would have lots to say here. She's the one assigned to this area of the projects we manage.
But this is an area that causes most of the problems I encounter on projects. What is causes more problems though is when some PM pundits dismiss PMBOK as the source of the problem, when in fact it is the core human behavior of
NOT accept input from reality and responding to it.
One of Jim Collin's Good to Great elements is "confront the brutal facts."
