Animus Wisdom

Project Management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual project manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a way that overall risk of failure is reduced.

A project manager is often a client representative and has to determine and implement the exact needs of the client based on knowledge of the firm he/she is representing. The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures of the contracting party, and to form close links with the nominated representatives, is essential in ensuring that the key issues of cost, time, quality and above all client satisfaction, can be realized.

In whatever field, a successful project manager must be able to envisage the entire project from start to finish and to have the ability to ensure that this vision is realized

Any type of product or service - buildings, vehicles, electronics, computer software, financial services, etc. - may have its implementation overseen by a project manager and its operations by a product manager.

Agile project management approaches based on the principles of human interaction management are founded on a process view of human collaboration. This contrasts sharply with traditional approach. In the agile software development or flexible product development approach, the project is seen as a series of relatively small tasks conceived and executed as the situation demands in an adaptive manner, rather than as a completely pre-planned process.

Mary Parker Follett, who wrote on the topic in the early twentieth-century, defined management as “the art of getting things done through people”. One can also think of management functionally, as the action of measuring a quantity on a regular basis and of adjusting some initial plan; or as the actions taken to reach one’s intended goal. This applies even in situations where planning does not take place. From this perspective, management consists of five functions:

• planning
• organizing
• leading
• co-ordinating
• controlling

Some people, however, find this definition, while useful, far too narrow. The phrase “management is what managers do” occurs widely, suggesting the difficulty of defining management, the shifting nature of definitions, and the connection of managerial practices with the existence of a managerial cadre or class.

One habit of though regards management as equivalent to “business administration”, although this then excludes management in places outside commerce, as for example in charities and in the public sector. Nonetheless, university departments which teach management usually get called “business schools”.

Speakers of English may also use the term “management” as a collective word describing the managers of an organization, for example of a corporation.

Scrum is an agile method for project management. Scrum was named as a project management style in auto and consumer product manufacturing companies by Takeuchi and Nonaka in “The New New Product Development Game” (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 1986). Jeff Sutherland documented, conceived and implemented Scrum as it is described below at Easel Corporation in 1993, incorporating team managment styles noted by Takeuchi and Nonaka. In 1995, Ken Schwaber formalized the definition of Scrum and helped deploy it worldwide in software development.

The Scrum process was first applied to software by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. It has been most thoroughly documented in the book Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle.

Scrum works because it is a highly-empowering process that allows requirements and self-organizing teams to emerge. In their book, Schwaber and Beedle describe Scrum as an empirical process that uses frequent inspection (daily meetings), collaboration and adaptive responses. They contrast this to defined processes in which every task and outcome is defined. Defined processes work only when the inputs to the process can be perfectly defined and there is very little noise, ambiguity or change. If that doesn’t sound like the software projects you work on, look into Scrum.

Its intended use is for management of software development projects, and it has been successfully used to “wrap” Extreme Programming and other development methodologies. However, it can theoretically be applied to any context where a group of people need to work together to achieve a common goal - such as setting up a small school, scientific research projects or planning a wedding.

Although scrum was intended to be for management of software development projects, it can be used in running maintenance teams, or as a program management approach: scrum of scrums.

Characteristics of Scrum

• A living backlog of prioritized work to be done;
• Completion of a largely fixed set of backlog items in a series of short iterations or sprints;
• A brief daily meeting or scrum, at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described and impediments are raised.
• A brief planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined.
• A brief heartbeat retrospective, at which all team members reflect about the past sprint.

Scrum is facilitated by a ScrumMaster, whose primary job is to remove impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal. The ScrumMaster is not the leader of the team (as they are self-organising) but acts as a productivity buffer between the team and any destabilising influences.

Scrum enables the creation of self-organising teams by encouraging verbal communication across all team members and across all disciplines that are involved in the project.

A key principle of scrum is its recognition that fundamentally empirical challenges cannot be addressed successfully in a traditional “process control” manner. As such, scrum adopts an empirical approach - accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to respond in an agile manner to emerging challenges.

I have added a small article on Scrum, Project Management and Management in General on the site,

I will soon post the steps in a Scrum Project.

View Article

^_^ Cheers

Prŏj’Ä•kt’ Măn’Ä­j-mÉ™nt

Recently I have renewed my interest in Project Management, I have refreshed my skills in the Agile Methodologies this Friday… my favourite I must admit is still Scrum.

I have started to give classes on the Agile process in a local collage and I will soon have enough funding to become a Certified ScrumMaster.

I wish to be involved more in the PM side of things and I will ask the school to fund my PMI Certification.

Cheers