Agile Tools for Volunteer and Community Groups

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

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Having used agile methods for part-time task forces within corporations with good success, it seemed logical to try them for volunteer and community-based philanthropy groups, too. These company task force groups had previously been struggling to maintain traction on improvement initiatives that use multi-disciplinary teams to investigate and improve cross-department processes--much like the challenges of keeping well-intentioned but time-limited volunteers moving forward toward important goals.

These company groups are staffed by senior engineers who volunteer to help make improvements, but the work is low priority and their time extremely limited. They are also geographically dispersed. Obviously that creates problems for agile practices like daily stand-ups if team members get on average of two to four hours per week to contribute on an initiative.

We see the same challenges for volunteer activities--agile promotes dedicated teams (co-location where possible), daily conversations with business stakeholders, etc. These groups have none of those things; volunteer communities are seeing good success. It seems when you are trying to coordinate the work effort of distributed, low-availability resources, the structure and visibility of tasks that agile brings is a great strength.

This somewhat counter-intuitive application makes more sense when you consider how such …

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