I recently read this book “Making work visible” by Dominica Degrandis which explains how to facilitate work organization by making it visual. It also nearly explains some recurrent problems which corporations overlook while designing work processes - the time thieves. The 5 time thieves prevent getting work done efficiently and can be identified (and minimized) when work is surfaced visually.
The 5 time thieves or categories of problems are:
Too much Work in Progress - this happens usually when demand exceeds the capacity of the team.
Agile projects come with their own challenges. While the tech industry has increasingly adopted agile, practical experience about agile methods is not always available. Certain consultancies and third parties have made roaring business out of the agile coaching usually solicited by corporations while embarking on agile transformations. In many cases, the corporations did not have a system of follow-up and in others the consultants did not help adapt the frameworks to the specific case at hand.
Agile planning is different from predictive planning done in traditional project management. Often we come across posts by certain agile evangelists who claim that agile doesn’t need planning. To believe these claims would mean there would be endless iterations with a fully-funded product development team to get to a perfect end-state without concern for time or cost. This is utopian and untrue. Usually these claims are made by developers or people far removed from business.
The Project Management Institute PMI is the premier standards and professional organization for project management. It works in collaboration with American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to develop and promote project management standards. Its certifications recognize knowledge and competency and the Project Management Professional (PMP® ) certification is widely considered as the gold standard. PMI has been criticised for being slow to adapt to changes e.
Disruption has gone mainstream. Ever since the media picked up on the disruption thread and the technology revolution where startups have disrupted established slow-moving corporations, there has been a flurry of activity at these staid organizations to get onto the innovation bandwagon. Advisory firm Gartner, who gave us “hype cycles” and who thrive on publishing “magic quadrants” has coined the term “bimodal” to sanctify an exploratory, experimental approach to IT. Organizations are rushing to instill “intrapreneurship”, accelerators, corporate venture capital funds, and innovation labs to preempt being disrupted.
With the increasing adoption of agile, there’s been a lot of talk about moving from the project-centric delivery to product-centric delivery model. Initially software/IT borrowed project management practices mainly from manufacturing / construction industries, and such projects generally used sequential, waterfall processes. The technology revolution and the pace of change in IT has made such approaches difficult to sustain and the software industry has been quick to adopt agile methods like scrum which are adapted to product-centric delivery instead of projects.
Eric Ries, a young American entrepreneur and ex-software engineer published “The Lean Startup” in 2011. The book is the collective wisdom of the valley and smart folks like Ries and Steve Blank about the purpose of a startup and the methods that help with it most efficiently. It’s because of the explosion of interest in the lean-startup methods that today concepts like “fail-fast”, “MVP”, “pivot” are commonplace. Coupled with lean-concepts and the experimentation afforded by agile methods, the lean-startup techniques improves the chances of success of a startup.
Scrum is the most popular agile framework out there. It uses 1 to 4 week iterations called sprints to deliver products. Developed by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, it has been used since the nineties, i.e. even before the 2001 agile manifesto was written. The word scrum is taken from rugby.
Being a framework, scrum needs to be tailored to your situation. A scrum team is supposed to be cross-functional and self-organizing in order to minimize dependencies and wait times while improving collaboration.
DevOps is the new buzzword for IT. It arose out of the need to resolve issues with delivery of software as development processes adopted agile approaches. But what exactly is DevOps?
DevOps is a philosophy which advocates close collaboration between development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) with a goal of delivering value to the end-user with improved agility and quality. Historically developers and IT operations were separated in their own silos.
Lean thinking is based on eliminating waste in order to improve efficiency. Lean project management relies on lean thinking concepts for the elimination of waste. Due to its inception in the quality and productivity improvement processes in Japanese manufacturing, especially the Toyota Production System, the three main categories of waste (3M) have Japanese names: muda, mura and muri .
Muda - any activity that consumes resources but creates no value for the customer
Agile is an approach to software development. Project management is the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements. Agile is not a methodology. What does then “agile project management” mean ?
Simply put, agile project management can be defined as the application of agile methods and values to project management. While there are several agile methods (Scrum, Kanban, XP, FDD etc.), all of them share the same core values, inspired from the agile manifesto.
The use of lean practices like Kanban boards has become really popular in project management, especially those using agile methods. But what exactly is Lean project management?
The application of lean manufacturing principles to project management can be roughly translated as lean project management. These principles were developed at Toyota, with the famous Toyota Production System employing kanban and the concepts of just-in-time (JIT)and “pull” to optimize flow and minimize inventory.
