Preparing Teams for Different Ways of Working

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

When I first started managing projects, I was given a lot of training on the mechanics of the job – estimation, scheduling, etc. I was also provided with some basic leadership guidance around how to develop and manage people. I went into my first project confident I knew everything there possibly could be to know about projects and project management.

Of course I knew nothing, and I learned that fact remarkably quickly! I learned a lot from that experience, but one of the most valuable takeaways has been an ongoing awareness that just because someone has had the basics explained to them doesn’t mean they have the skills and experience they need to succeed. I’ve seen it many times with project team members – they are assigned to a project for the first time, and everyone assumes they know how to work in a project environment.

Today, that same situation is becoming even more prevalent because of the growth of agile as an alternative project execution approach. For many organizations, agile and waterfall are both mainstream approaches to projects, and that requires increasing numbers of project team members to be capable of working in both environments. For those employees who have grown up with either of the approaches exclusively, this is like “resetting” their project knowledge to zero again; they need to be helped to understand how to …

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