Topic Teasers Vol. 143: Working With Mixed Process Teams

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  Agile   New Practitioners   Scrum  

I am going to head a team on a large, corporate project that will involve multiple teams. The problem is that we are not all going to be using the same methods of project management, and I am concerned about how we will be able to work together if we are not all following the same processes. Is it possible for various parts of the organization to work in different ways and still produce a good product​?

A. As has been proven over and over in the last 20 years, if all teams in the organization are not on the same process—preferably some form of agile—and adhering to it precisely, the corporate projects usually fail.

B. If you are not all working using the same methodology throughout the organization, it is important to set up the project so that there are no dependencies between teams. Just allow each group to work the way they know, and at a final date in the future all the parts of the project can be successfully joined for the final product.

C. The future will hold more and more projects with different parts of the business working in different ways. The thing for a project manager to do is to learn the vocabulary and roles of many processes and toolkits so that they can speak multiple project management languages.

D. …

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