Mike Cottmeyer gave a webcast on an approach to managing projects with agile techniques. This talk has some good points. But like many of these presentations, the non-agile project examples are "notional" at best. This means they are simple examples, and not likely representative of real projects.
Notional is good at laying the foundational for an educational process. But Notional usually looses it impact when a "real" project environment comes into play. The presentation above has several over simplified statements:
- The PM is the center of the project. This is one of those notional concepts found in books about how Agile is better. Any sufficiently mature project manager knows that being the PM means having people perform at their best as a "team," not as subordinates of the PM. This arrangement takes place through the Chartering process, where all the participants discover what roles they play, what the basic deliverables are, and what other participants depend on them and what dependencies they are accountable for. This is the essence of team building.
- Mike suggests that we stop putting activities into the project plans. This is wonderful IFF (if and only if) there are no dependencies between these activities. That is, they can be performed in nay manner chosen by the team. If however there are dependencies between the activities, the place to discover these is during the construction of the network of activities. It may be a tautology in agile, that activities have no dependencies. If so, Mike's on to something regarding the defining the context of an agile project.
- Focusing on outcomes is always a good thing. This is the very essence of Earned Value, Deliverables Based Planning, and Integrated Master Planning / Integrated Master Scheduling found in DoD projects.
- Iterative Planning is nearly the same as rolling waves mandated by DoD 5000.2. This has been around awhile, but for some reasons missed by those not thinking very well about what project management planning really means. The key of course is to define in some tangible measurable way, in units meaningful to the customer.
- Daily standups, yes this is good. But daily may or may not be the right frequency. Knowing the right frequency us a challenge, but answering the question - how long am I willing to wait to find out we're late? is a good start.
But read this presentation, try out some of the ideas, see if they have applicability for you.
