Upcoming Presentation: Cloudy with a Chance of Agile

 

By Renaldi Gondosubroto, CAPM, PMP, Project Lead, GReS Studio

A report from Palo Alto Networks in 2021 showed that businesses are moving quickly into the cloud as part of their Covid-19 response. Nearly 70% of organizations now host more than half of their workloads in the cloud, and adoption of the cloud has grown by 25% in the past year. Due to the rapid trend and necessity of shifting workloads towards the cloud, it has become more important than ever for project managers to gain the skills necessary to manage cloud-based projects. As part of this, we need to create appropriate strategies using agile practices, particularly given the rapidly changing business landscape caused by Covid-19. These strategies will be important in quickly adapting to the needs of individual projects.

The evolution of project management for the cloud has gone a long way. From having communication and role delegation in multiple places, we now have slowly converged to having such communications happen from one place. This advancement ensures a central hub of communications, effective for quick responses within organizations, keeps track of incidents and costs within the platform. These two factors will certainly face a transformation from the standard way of doing things we are used to. The cloud has also ensured the provision of support from cloud providers to ensure quick responses within the organization.

Those new to the cloud should start off planning how to shift workloads towards it. Shifting workloads would go through a four-stage process: discovery, plan, execute and go live. In discovery, allocate time to exploring which cloud platforms are available and what resources the company currently must allocate towards the venture. As part of planning, draft a plan to prepare for creating the first deployments, including budgeting and creating sample architectures in the trial process as part of the execution. In execution, the plans we set into motion can shift towards the cloud, starting from the least-critical services. Finally, if everything goes well and issues are resolved, we can go live and let the services be provided as normal but through the cloud.

The stage set for a project manager looking to gain insight and skills for managing projects within the cloud comes with many new important knowledge and challenges that they need to take in and face. It may seem like a lot of new technical knowledge to take in, but exposure to the basic know-how of the cloud already helps a project manager go a long way. One of such is understanding the roles and responsibilities that cloud projects bring. Aside from a project manager for each team, five roles that would be imperative for a project manager to be aware of and find out more about are cloud architects, cloud engineers, software developers, security specialists and compliance specialists. Despite it not being necessary to gain their specific skillsets, it is important to have at least a high-level overview of their roles within the teams to adapt the skills for their project’s context.

There are existing and new skills imperative for project managers to know in this environment. Some existing skills include scope management, stakeholder management and change management. Project managers must apply these skills in the cloud project management context. Scope management is important as we need to understand goals, tasks, and deliverables in a cloud context, especially since it can be overwhelming when exploring the possibilities of outcomes when migrating onto the cloud. Stakeholder management is a key skill in migrating or running projects towards or on the cloud; we need to ensure that we get stakeholder approval; be it from clients or executive management. If there is a disconnect between the team and key stakeholders, it will result in issues down the line and unnecessary redundancy in communications as they must be repeated. Change management is imperative as migration certainly brings about changes to how workloads run in the business and key performance indicators (KPIs) and objectives and key results (OKRs), so we need to keep track of the tools and processes that we can use to ensure that change is started and managed well.

Essential knowledge that will be important for a project manager to grasp include contextual knowledge to make the case, ethics, and basic knowledge of the cloud. In getting executive management or other relevant parties to get on board with running projects on the cloud, we need to get contextual knowledge on why we are doing so. What is working? What can be improved with moving towards the cloud? Would migrating to the cloud make some projects work better or would it instead worsen it? This comes hand in hand with basic cloud knowledge of the cloud platform you are planning to shift the workloads towards. For example, as a project manager managing projects on the cloud, it was encouraged within my organization to study towards and achieve AWS certifications, at least on a basic level. Not only does it validate your knowledge, but it will also help you gain the know-how and be confident in leading projects in the cloud. Finally, it is important to understand the ethics behind the transition, including how chosen cloud platforms handle privacy or meet compliance standards such as PCI-DSS for credit cards.

Organizational capacity will also be an important topic to consider when discussing the management of projects within the cloud, as it is imperative to measure how prepared the organization is to handle the proportion of workloads run in it or the migration planned for it. Considering the budgeting required to run such workloads includes thinking about the training costs required (internally or externally) and experimentation costs with finding out what works. We also need to consider whether managing projects on the cloud align with the project’s targets and goals and the company’s values overall and whether they can meet stakeholders’ and compliance needs. It is important to scope out how much existing knowledge is currently prevalent within the company and how it can essentially factor in reducing costs or be an advantage in working on the project, especially if the team has previously not yet worked on projects on the cloud before.

Throughout the project planning and the rest of the project phases, it is imperative to have a solid communication plan, particularly one that can sustain the needs of agile practices. Teams can use collaborative tools such as Slack or Jira and use scrum meetings to identify blockers and iteratively build and update on what has been done. This will be imperative, especially when managing your first projects based on the cloud, as things are more likely than not to go wrong when using something you have not used before. To complement this, we could also integrate customer relationship management (CRM) tools such as Salesforce to manage relevant stakeholders’ needs within one platform, if not through the mentioned collaborative tools.

Finally, it is important to categorize workloads and track their relevant KPIs to measure performance and iteratively act based on the outcomes. One recommended approach is to categorize the workloads between tier 1 (not mission-critical), tier 2 (low-risk) and tier 3 (mission-critical) workloads. While doing so, it is important to consider factors that would impact the categorizations made, including security, scalability, cost, and accessibility handled by each workload that is to be categorized. Tracking KPIs will help iteratively developing the decisions made, including finding out how it has performed on-premises, how it is performing on the cloud, and whether new configurations need to be made to optimize it.

As mentioned, the concept of managing projects on the cloud may seem intimidating at first glance, particularly given the load of technical knowledge and expertise that would need to be understood by the project manager as part of this. Still, it requires a bit more time dedicated to out of the normal project management environments we are used to and dabbles a bit on the cloud side. Gaining basic knowledge of the know-how around cloud projects is not difficult to do and will certainly help ensure you are equipped to better handle such projects. With the shift of more and more workloads from businesses towards the cloud, particularly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we can be sure that this will be a continuing trend. The question is, as project managers, are we ready to ensure our roles are also prepared for this new, prevalent trend? We certainly can be ready to approach this by planning effectively for it and going agile!

Interested in learning more and furthering the dialogue? Join me and the rest of the project management community at PMI’s Virtual Experience Series: PMXPO 24 March and check out my presentation, “Cloudy with a Chance of Agile.”