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Tag: Agile

PMTimes_July26_2022

Save Project Time With the Kanban Method

Have you ever heard about the Kanban method? It is a method of work management that emerged in the Toyota Production System in the late 40s. At that time Toyota began to work with the “just in time” production system, so production was based on demand. This system started the foundations of Lean Manufacturing and lean production. What does this mean? That it is a production whose objective is to minimize waste, that is, create more value for customers but without generating more expenses.

What is Kanban?

PMTimes_July26_2022

Figure 1. The Kanban Method. Source: https://getnave.com/blog/what-is-the-kanban-method/. Author: Sonya Siderova

Currently using Kanban boards are excellent tools to organize the workflow.  In addition, it is a very flexible method, which allows you to modify processes in the face of interruptions or unexpected and increase productivity. How? Through its 3 Kanban board states: To do, done and ready.

At the beginning of the day, or the beginning of a project, a list of objectives is drawn up, these are works that have to be carried out. The tasks that are on this list will be moved to the next as they are carried out, so they will first be in “to be done“, then “in progress” and, finally, in “done“. This is how the habit of computing tasks at work is worked, transparency is better since all team members know the state in which the project is and what each team member is dedicating their time to.

Thus, the Kanban method follows the philosophy Stop Starting, start finishing“, this means that it focuses on prioritizing the work that is already started before starting any other. In this way, there are a maximum number of tasks that can be performed for each phase before starting with the next one.

 

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How does Kanban work?

There are several basic principles to get the most out of your workflow.

  • Visualize what you do (your workflow): A visualization of all your tasks and items in a table will help all members of your team to stay on top of your work.
  • Limit the amount of Work in Process (WIP): Set affordable goals. Maintain the balance of your workflow by limiting in-process jobs to prevent over-commitment in the number of tasks you will be unable to complete.
  • Track time: Time tracking converges with the Kanban methodology. Track your time continuously and evaluate your work accurately.
  • Easy reading of visual indicators: Know what’s happening at a glance. Use colored cards to distinguish Job Types, Priorities, Labels, Deadlines, and more.
  • Identify bottlenecks and eliminate what’s disposable: make the most of lead times and cycles, Cumulative Flow, and time reporting. These criteria will allow you to evaluate your performance, detect problems, and adjust the workflow accordingly.

Even the most basic Kanban method will produce an increase in performance. A simple distribution of tasks, coupled with monitoring your workflow and making appropriate adjustments throughout the process will increase your efficiency. A software development team can experience formidable improvements over 12 months, following the implementation of Kanban. Delivery time can be reduced by 37% and consistency in delivery can be rebounded by 47%.

PMTimes_July26_2022

Figure 2. Kanban Practices

Saving time with the Kanban method

Time is the central part of the Kanban philosophy, which is why most teams that bet on this method opt for time tracking. One of the great advantages of Kanban is the ability to point out bottlenecks in development processes by imposing a limit on the number of active tasks a team can have open at any given time. if the number of tasks in the process is too high the team must identify the problem and resolve it.

However, it is important to understand that bottlenecks do not have to be a symptom of an organizational problem, nor do they mean that developers are too slow. Rather, they indicate that an attempt has been made to cover more work than the team could manage, so it is time to either look for more staff or reduce the workload and extend the time of the project.

But what are the other advantages of the Kanban method?

With the Kanban method is very easy to detect bottlenecks, but this work system has many more benefits.

  • Prevention of unnecessary processes: through Kanban boards an effective transmission of information is carried out so that failures and delays caused by poor communication can be avoided. This translates into agile development and avoiding unnecessary additional processes.
  • Encourages teamwork: all the workers of the team have access to information, know the process and know what tasks have to be performed previously so that theirs can be performed, even those who may be waiting for their task to be finished to be able to start theirs. In this way, solidarity between the team is strengthened and the active participation of all staff is encouraged.
  • Production flexibility: this method allows you to respond quickly to changes and make the necessary adjustments to the strategy. In addition, as we have said before, only what is necessary is produced or carried out, so resources and time are saved.
  • Increase in the efficiency of the processes: it is clear that those processes that generate greater profits in the best conditions, with the highest quality, and in the least amount of time are the most effective for the company. Kanban allows performing the necessary tasks for the phases of the project within the necessary period.

That is why the Kanban method is ideal for companies that require a lot of flexibility, especially in terms of entry of new tasks, as well as during the monitoring of these. Using the Kanban boards you can perform supervision of the work team and the tasks in progress, as well as get a global vision.

PMTimes_May31_2022

Rise of the Agile PMO

The PMI PMBOK defines Project Management Office (PMO) as “a management structure that standardizes the project-related governance processes and facilitates the sharing of resources, methodologies, tools, and techniques”.

In practice PMOs are rolled out in any number of flavors across organizations and industries. There is no standardization, and the level of authority and autonomy varies across organizations and industries. The primary charter of a PMO should be to provide a framework that augments the organization’s ability to consistently deliver business value in alignment with strategic objectives.  As organizations undergo agile transformation, there is a pertinent need to reflect on how PMO adapts itself to become agile and continue to stay relevant in the new way of working.

PMI’s 2021 Pulse of the Profession® survey reveals the emergence of gymnastic enterprise. These organizations and their project teams combine structure, form, and governance with the ability to flex and pivot—wherever and whenever needed. Their research indicates that gymnastic enterprises achieve greater success by developing a range of value delivery capabilities—and that unless traditional enterprises can emulate this approach, they risk becoming obsolete in an increasingly digitized and unpredictable world.

It is in this context the need for emergence of an agile PMO promoting organizational agility becomes obvious. By agile, we don’t mean usage of agile methodologies, rather a department that truly embraces an agile mindset.

Before looking at what it takes to have an agile PMO, let us quickly note some of the negative perceptions about PMOs:

  • Heavily process oriented and considered burdensome by other parts of the organization
  • Project prioritization not aligned with strategy
  • Focusses just on meeting senior management expectations and lacks focus on delivering any real value to the project teams.
  • Lacking visibility on Return on Investment (ROI) of project and program initiatives. Focus is primarily on getting the projects closed.

PMI Agile Practice guide proposes that an agile PMO should be a value driven, innovation driven and multi-disciplinary department. Let us look at the success factors for such an agile PMO.

  1. Alignment with organization strategy. Portfolios, Programs and Projects are vehicles through which organizations invest valuable resources like staff, infrastructure, finances etc to achieve tangible and intangible outcomes creating a certain value or benefit. As these resources are never available in plenty and the expectations on time to market are becoming more stringent, it is crucial that these resources are invested in initiatives that matter the most to the organization’s aspirations and ambitions.

 

A typical organization at any point of time has a need to execute a large number of projects and programs.  Further different business units and departments have their own preferences on delivery priorities. It is in this context a PMO has a great role to play to ensure that by means of prioritization of portfolio, programs and projects, resources are invested in initiatives that lead to the maximum realization of the organization objectives.

The true value of agile PMO becomes evident when this prioritization exercise is not aimed at merely pushing the senior leadership’s vision on to the delivery teams but rather focuses to converge the organization’s aspirations and the current execution capability and bring in an alignment between the two that leads to the overall benefit of the organization.

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An example here is that traditionally, resource managers are forced to assign their resources to multiple high priority initiatives. While on paper the sum of the hours a resource is allocated to different projects and programs adds up to 100%, in reality it is not so. Valuable time is lost in context switching. Also, having to do this for long periods of time ultimately impacts the quality of work and can lead to burn-out.

 

Another example could be when a new technology has to be introduced to achieve an organization goal. A pragmatic review of whether the necessary skills and knowledge are available in the organization and if not, what it takes to build those is important to be considered. It is in this context that by acting as a glue between the various departments and teams and aligning all teams to march towards well balanced goals that a PMO can prove its true value.

  1. Light weight processes and governance – Delivery and governance processes are essential to ensure a consistent approach for achieving outcomes. Equally important is to have clear escalation protocols for taking corrective actions when needed. In the current times where agile delivery practices are becoming the norm, it is important to realize and appreciate that one size fits all approach does not always work. Different delivery methodologies suit better for different kinds of projects and outcomes. It could be that traditional waterfall, or a hybrid combination of waterfall and agile practices suit certain projects and teams. An agile PMO should acknowledge this and be able to guide the project teams on the most suitable delivery methodology along with a light and effective set of processes and governance models. PMO should not be an enforcer but be a partner fully invested in the successful realization of the project outcomes.
  2. Contributing to delivery excellence – An agile PMO can deliver value to the rest of the organization by providing necessary tools, processes and metrics to monitor, track and report on how the teams are delivering the project and program outcomes. Tools and processes should include means to track and report progress of team deliveries, track and report inter team delivery dependencies, to roll up and map team priorities to the organization priorities. Teams should also have access to processes and tools to raise and monitor impediments and track risks. In addition, PMO should lay out a set of metrics that effectively measure business delivery excellence, operational and technical excellence of the teams and consequently that of the organization. These metrics should provide the necessary information needed for the organization to make better decisions.
  3. Multi-disciplinary team – Organizations across industries are going through transformation and radical changes. It is a given that rapid advancements in technology like proliferation of AI/ML across industries, newer ways of working like remote, hybrid, citizen development etc. have a profound impact on how organizations function. PMO is one unit that, by the nature of its charter, is in a unique position to truly act as a change agent and enable the project teams to perform to their best.  To be able to do so, PMO staff should be experts not only in project and program management methodologies, but they also need acumen in business and technology.

 

Conclusion

In these exciting times where businesses across the spectrum are undergoing transformations, re-inventing and optimizing product offerings, the agility of PMO is an important contributor towards the organization’s business agility.

References

  1. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/de/Documents/technology/pmo-excellence.pdf
  2. Agile Practice Guide (2017).
  3. PMBOK® Guide (2021).
  4. Pulse of the Profession 2021 (2021).

 

Progressive PMOs are harnessing the power of Citizen Developers

A few of my colleagues raise eyebrows when I mention that I used to be a programmer back in the days, I am not talking about assembly language, but I could write a few things in Java and C++. Recently I picked up some new skills creating Power Apps, connecting data with Microsoft Dataverse, building Power BI Dashboards, automating processes with Power Automate, and building chatbots with Power Virtual Agents whilst preparing for Microsoft’s Power Platform Fundamentals certification. This is part of a growing trend of what has been termed Citizen Development.

Citizen development is an innovative approach to dealing with application development needs that a lot of Project Management Offices (PMOs) are now adopting. This innovative and inclusive approach to application development addresses the ever-increasing need for PMOs to keep abreast with technological change and the associated demand for user-friendly, hassle-free applications. Enterprise Technology departments are not always best to shoulder all the responsibilities related to digital transformation.

That’s where the inclusive idea of citizen development comes in as a broad-based and innovative solution. It enables project managers and implementers to develop applications on their own and in accordance with the most pressing PMO needs. Of course, they need to have advanced level of digital skills to use the low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms, but with those skills taken for granted, almost any team member could take a stab at it.

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Citizen development has multiple benefits for the PMO and project management. By project management, I mean its agile and strategic version. Initially, this is far better for the current needs of success-oriented PMOs. Although traditional, waterfall types of project management would also gain. The benefits span many different sectors, whether it be public sector agencies, financial services, or non-governmental organizations. There is growing evidence that citizen development works, and that it works well for both organizations and individual employees. Let us examine what these benefits are and why they are important for the PMO and project management, irrespective of the field.

Cost-Effectiveness

This is an obvious one. With application development demands being extremely taxing on Enterprise Technology departments, LCNC platforms provide substantial cost-saving opportunities to PMOs. PMOs can thus channel the savings to other, under-resourced needs. Experts estimate that by using LCNC resources, applications can be developed 10 times faster when compared with traditional methods.

PMOs can also expect savings on the maintenance of the new applications. Maintenance and application support are normally separate line items in operational budgets. Higher-end products usually require significant inputs to avoid disruptions and breakdown. The maintenance and support cost are minimal for the applications developed by citizen developers. The overall cost to develop and maintain LCNC -based applications is estimated to be 74% lower than the cost of traditional development led by Enterprise Technology resources. In addition, LCNC platforms hosting present sizable cost reductions, as shown by the experience of Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance. The company was able to save $1.4 million because of creative use of LCNC tools.

Breaking Down Silos

As citizen developers engage in software or application development, coordination with other business units of an organization becomes an absolute must. LCNC platforms do not require expert digital skills to use, but they need citizen developers to ensure that the end products are relevant to the PMO’s needs. From the perspective of effective PMO role, this is a great way of breaking down silos, which exist in all organizations. Improved teamwork and camaraderie are the important by-products of citizen development, which have long-term benefits. Citizen developers cannot go it alone, and it always takes a team effort to ensure that the end-product meets the critical needs of an organization. Importantly, this includes coordination of Enterprise Technology and non- Enterprise Technology resources too.

Agility

Citizen development also has the potential to make the PMO more agile. It expects non- Enterprise Technology resources to demonstrate adaptability and willingness to learn – two key attributes of an agile organization. From the perspective of the PMO, citizen development becomes a new and unconventional way of spurring continuous learning as an iterative and inclusive process.

Innovation and Creativity

By encouraging non-Enterprise Technology department resources to become software and application developers, PMOs can create a workspace conducive to creativity and innovation. As it happens, when people are given space and opportunity to punch above their weight, they usually outdo themselves by coming up with something extraordinary. Citizen development consequently becomes a great approach to egging people on to think outside the box. Agile organizations need to be innovative and creative. Equally, they need to be adaptive and committed to continuous learning.

Digitisation and Organizational Culture

The more employees get involved in citizen development, the better for the PMO and digital transformation. As PMOs take steps to adapt to the needs of digital transformation, citizen development becomes a timely and cost-effective method. It nurtures an organizational culture favourable for project resources and other non-Enterprise Technology resources to embrace change and make it work for themselves and the organization. It is this type of culture that becomes pivotal in weathering the storm of imminent changes and making the most of new opportunities for development.

Relevance and Flexibility

The involvement of PMO resources as citizen developers warrants the relevance of newly developed software and applications. No one could be more intrinsically motivated to ensure that they serve the purpose than the end-users themselves. I’m sure you can recall cases when even very expensive IT products turned out to be missing the mark. When developed in isolation from an organization’s core strategic goals and needs, they become underutilized. With less stringent requirements imposed; citizen developers have more flexibility to adjust as they go. As application development becomes faster, citizen development makes it easier to maintain the end products.

Summary

Citizen development has been winning over an increasing number of progressive PMOs and organizations. There is growing evidence that it leads to substantial cost-savings, encourages innovation, and makes organizations more agile. PMOs use it effectively to ease the workload of Enterprise Technology resources. Such departments are often understaffed or incapable of dealing with an ever-increasing list of requests and demands.

Citizen development makes a valuable contribution to an organizational culture that promotes creativity and initiative. In the current era of digital transformation, it is critical for agile organizations to create opportunities for their employees. This is to test and improve their digital skills. The experience of organizations that have embraced LCNC platforms for their non-Enterprise Technology resources to develop new applications shows that citizen development is definitely worth the effort.

Choosing Scrum over Kanban – Why we Switched

As we set out on the Agile journey, picking Kanban seemed like a no-brainer. It is visual, easy to use, and a perfect fit for the PM tool we have been developing. However, after a short few months, we realized Scrum was indeed a better fit and switched.

Here is our story, hopefully, it will give you some insights.

Why did we choose Kanban?

As a small engineering team with a new product (we develop a project management tool called Teamhood) we had no strict timeliness or process to follow. Thus, Kanban seemed like a perfect fit. It allowed us to visualize what is happening, prioritize the most important items and track their progress.

The team would meet for a daily standup to discuss progress and monthly retrospectives would be held to see what could be improved. All of this was great up until the product beta went live and the focus of the engineering team had to shift.

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Why did it not work?

With the launch of our beta version, we got the first paying customers. Yay! But with that came customer expectation management and a need to provide reliable forecasts for the new features.

With the engineering team working in Kanban, the sales and marketing teams had issues in knowing when to expect new features. In result of that, they were not able to plan timely marketing and sales actions to promote the new features that were coming out.

Moreover, the clients needed to know when specific features would be live, and the engineering team was not able to provide those answers. As such, we knew it was time to change.

How Scrum improved our process

Thus, instead of Kanban, we switched over to Scrum and introduced new practices to improve the process.

First, we have chosen 2-week iterations to ease estimation and feature predictability. Now we had to think about which features can be delivered in two weeks’ time and commit to them. This was especially useful for the sales and marketing teams that were communicating with existing and potential customers.

We have also divided the work into several boards to better separate different processes. Design, Roadmap planning, Backlog, UI/UK, and Development are all done on different boards, thus better categorizing all of the work items.

We have introduced various new ceremonies to make sure all the processes are under control. Roadmap planning and prioritizations, Backlog review, Backlog planning, Backlog refinement, Backlog planning, and others were added to make sure we are delivering value to our customers and working on the most important features.

Lastly, we have started using T-shirt sizes to estimate the features. This helps us ensure each feature we commit to can be delivered during one iteration. Otherwise, we rework the feature to make sure it can fit the iteration or push it back to the drawing board.

What’s next?

We have successfully moved away from Kanban and into Scrum territory. However, this Scrum application is far from the textbook. In fact, some could argue that it is far more resembling Scrumban. I don’t disagree.

Will we move towards full Scrum in the future? No one knows. However, we will not do it just for the name. Instead of applying any of the practices blindly, we tend to look and see what works best for the process and our needs now.

Have you changed Agile practices with your team? I would love to hear your comments.

OKR and Project Management

What are OKRs?

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. This allows to clearly define the course in a project must be set to achieve the expected result, for this OKRs are established in objectives that can be measured. The OKR method consists, first in establishing qualitative objectives, and second define the strategy to quantify the outcomes and the achievement of these objectives. In addition, it is essential that once the results of the process have been quantified, a retrospective is made to discuss the results obtained (Something that can be associated with the development of agile methodologies).

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One of the main characteristics that enhance the positive impact of OKRs is that they vary between two types of objectives:

  1. Very difficult objectives to achieve. The purpose of these objectives is to motivate the team and exploit their skills to the fullest.
  2. Achievable objectives, which can be developed smoothly by the team.

These two types of objectives must vary and coexist to achieve good outcomes.

What are the differences between OKRs and KPIs?

The main difference between KPIs and OKRs is that KPIs are performance indicators associated with the team and the process with which the results are obtained. OKR is associated with increments to deliver value in an iteration or the final result of an iteration, having a more global reach of the organization.

OKR in Agility

In agility the purpose of each iteration is to add value to the product that is being developed, OKRs can play an important role since they provide support in the efficiency of processes and allow to enhance their value based on organizational goals. In an agile organization, the team needs to define, by themselves, OKRs. This is because there will be no one better at setting the key results than the same team that plans to develop them.

KRs

It is essential to be focused on the KR or key results and this must be differentiated from the tasks.

  1. A key outcome must be geared towards what needs to be achieved.
  2. One task will be how development is proposed.

For this reason, KRs should be prevented from being sorted as a task list.

In order to measure these results, it is necessary to establish a scoring scale:

  1. Between 0 and 1 using decimals
  2. Between 0 and 10 with integers

One of the indicators that must be borne in mind is that the score must be staggered, that is, if we have scores for results that only indicate 0 and 1 or 0 and 10 should be analyzed since they possibly resemble a list of tasks (a situation that has already been described and should be avoided).

The key results for them to be scored should be as least subjective as possible. An example of this can be, for example, if a company has fixed a KR to increase monthly sales considerably, instead of, to fix a KR to increase monthly sales by 10%, the latter will be easier to measure.

A fairly common mistake in the results is that they don’t know how to measure KRs, which could completely divert the development of the activities of a team.

OKRs must always be established at the team level and the work to consolidate them must always be collaborative, it is common that between 4 and 8 KR are established by objectives and that those are evaluated in a period.

The O

The objectives are what guide the development of the KR and are fundamental to know the direction of the project or product that you want to develop. Its fundamental characteristics are:

  1. They must be challenging and inspiring objectives since in this way the team will be motivated to achieve them.
  2. The objective should qualitatively describe what you want to achieve with the result or/and the product.
  3. They must be limited to a period in which they will be developed.

The objectives, unlike the results, can spare with the metrics to be reflected, that is, they do not need a numerical parameter that limits since they are qualitative propositions.

In the objectives there are two key errors that can damage the methodology:

  1. Set impossible objectives; since the people who will develop the activities will be unmotivated under the knowledge that they will not be able to consolidate it. Usually, this happens if the goal is set by a person who doesn´t develop the activities (The principle of self-organized teams is not followed).
  2. Set easy objectives; like the previous one demotivation is generated, in this case, objectives don´t invite to work for them.

OKRs Methodology and Cycle

To implement OKR in your organization or even in your personal life, you have to follow the next steps:

  1. Review or define your annual vision and mission. In the current environment with the changes in the market, laws, economy, and customers preference, it is important to review and validate if these statements are true yet.
  2. Define the strategy to face changes and uncertainty and accomplish with the vision and mission.
  3. Define key objectives that must be aligned to the vision, mission, and strategies. This is a 3- or 4-months cycle. To establish it, follow the next steps:
    1. Define objectives with your team. Each objective must be clear, time achievable, and measurable.
    2. Specify the actions for each objective that can help to achieve it. Each action could represent a project initiative.
    3. Each week, review your progress based on the metrics from every project and analyze if you are in the correct direction.
    4. If you detect deviation improve your OKRs making the changes needed to correct it.
    5. After 3 or 4 months, repeat the cycle with the aim to make changes and improve OKRs again.

Figure 1. OKR Methodology and Cycle

OKRs and Project Management

While OKR is the way to define objectives for a short period, and establish the desirable results, project management, especially agile methodologies, is the way to become those objectives and results into a reality. OKRs allow business and project managers to face uncertain, evaluate risk, and changes in the market to set the direction and to make decisions about what changes are needed in current projects or which projects initiate or cancel.

Figure 2. OKRs and Project Management

The objectives execution through project management allows to gather the information and get the metrics needed to determine if objectives are achieved in a short period, with the aim to execute the OKR cycle again. From objectives, product owners, business analysts, and project managers can organize and plan releases, iterations, and sprints to develop the product.

Figure 3. OKRs and Project Management Alignment

Final Considerations

  1. To develop OKRs one of the keys is consistency in them since it will be useless to start based on them and then never feedback or evaluate them.
  2. It is always good to reference the methodology in already proven models, however, to achieve the maximum potential and understand the development of a specific case it is convenient to study and adapt the OKRs.
  3. OKRs are a very powerful tool, however, it is difficult to strategically guide an organization based on them because:
  • They don’t necessarily have a long-term vision but are set for more limited periods.
  • Lack of management in the evolution of different scenarios and the detection of changes.
  • They only contemplate the results.
  • The processes to achieve results are based on project management.

OKRs can be defined as a tool of the great potential that will allow articulating with other procedures to obtain what would be an organizational strategy.