Presentation Recap: Cloudy with a Chance of Agile

 

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

I had the pleasure and honour of delivering my presentation at PMI's Virtual Experience Series: PMXPO on 24 March, a global event attracting more than 64,000 attendees. My presentation, “Cloudy with a Chance of Agile,” addressed the growing trend of managing projects on the cloud, the skills project managers need to possess to be able to manage projects on the cloud well, and how they need to consider a multitude of factors, including organizational capacity and communication plans, while utilizing the agile methodology to best facilitate the management of such projects. 

It is imperative to note that although I focus on the agile methodology on managing cloud projects in this presentation, it is important to keep what works from traditional project management methodology and combine it with agile to create a hybrid way of work that will be effective for managing your projects. In this recap, I will respond to several questions asked during my presentation.

1. Is there a good source/website that compares the various services across the major cloud providers and positives/negatives of each? The cloud services are evolving rapidly, and it is difficult to provide advice/assess which is most cost effective and offers best long-term ROI.

There are certainly many sites that provide this. Companies like VMWare or community and educational sites like ACloudGuru or ComputerWorld provide some insights on this, highlighting the pros and cons of each service. These tend to be very technical though, which is why it is imperative for a project manager to also gain general cloud knowledge to be able to get a foundational level understanding of what is being discussed and better assess which offers best long-term ROI. If you have any subject matter experts on select cloud platforms within the company, it would be great to ask for their expertise, or also consult with available stakeholders that may be able to provide valuable insights on this. 

Another avenue for advice would be directly from the cloud platforms themselves or their relevant partners. Libraries such as the AWS Solutions Consulting Offers from AWS provides selections of qualified companies and personnel that can be consulted to provide advice if the platform serves well towards your needs. Experimentation on the usage of different providers will also determine which can work best. Take advantage of cloud platforms’ free tiers in experimenting without cost to get a feel for them as a start within the learning process for managing these cloud projects as a project manager.

2. Please discuss the relationship / contradictions between Scope Management and an ever-changing product backlog.

When managing product backlogs in cloud projects, it is crucial to ensure that appropriate scope management is maintained. Often, scope creep happens due to failure to adhere to proper backlog grooming practices as part of agile. Doing grooming helps with the removal of irrelevant items which do not help with adding the value to the product and align priorities to what is needed from the current sprint. It is the project managers’ job to ensure that items are aligned with the needs and goals for the sprint.

During these sessions, project managers need to arrange for the priorities of items in the backlog based on priority, setting them based on value provided to the business, complexity, cost and how ready the item is to be taken up to be worked on. When there is a clear definition for what needs to be done for the item, teams can effectively understand what needs to be done for the current sprint. This will also help them with having efficient sprint planning sessions and not be surprised when an item turns out to be much simpler or complicated than expected.

Another important aspect is to ensure that new items go through a specific process and are not forced in the middle of a sprint. Scope creep often happens when a team thinks they can just add in a new item because they believe the item can easily be done, although it would certainly affect the sprint whether they like it or not. Such items need to go through a proper cost and requirements analysis and follow the same process of grooming, planning and push for inclusion in an upcoming sprint.

3. We are comingling project management and Agile software development as if they are the same thing and they are not the same. Getting people to understand this is a challenge we see in practice. Do you have suggestions on how best to marry traditional project management knowledge areas to the daily protocols inherent in Agile software development?

Many of the efforts of combining traditional project management knowledge areas to the daily protocols inherent in agile software development can be seen from what has been done with hybrid project management. Essentially, this will depend on simply seeing which works best for you in certain case scenarios and how you can bring the best of both from your experience. From my experience, I have had a couple of examples in combining them based on what has worked with me, such as with combining both methodologies in scope management and communications management.

Within scope management, we have seen the prevalence of the work breakdown structure (WBS) in traditional project management. In defining project scope, we could still need a WBS to lay out the scope, goals, and the overall big picture of the process of the project, but we can then combine it with the sprints that will be used to manage sprints based on the roadmap laid out by the WBS. This concurrent coordination makes for effective scope management based on using both methodologies and creates a great combination that would have been better than if either were used themselves.

In project communications, we are used to creating the relevant communications management plan for stakeholders and the details for the method and frequency of communication with them. We can combine the relevant documents for the communication plans for different stakeholders with the agile software development protocols we use in communication such as stand-ups and sprint-based tools such as Jira or Trello. Doing so would increase the value of just having traditional communication plans, particularly since we would be able to have a more robust communication system with understanding how each could contribute towards the bigger picture of the project management plan.

The other knowledge areas can be comingled in the same way; we just need to find what we already have that currently works and what could be improved with agile. This is not to say that some aspects may not be as easily comingled, so if this is the case, it is necessary to see which works better in the case scenario and choose one of the methodologies to approach it with. This must be done from a perspective gauging which approach would bring more value to the project.

4. Do we need to have any IT technical background to be PM of a cloud project?

Normally, you do not need to have an in-depth IT background to manage a cloud project, but it is recommended that you at least have a minimum understanding of the work that members of the team are doing. This was why I recommended project managers to pursue foundational level certifications for cloud platforms; to understand many important items that will be worked on and considerations for the project, the project manager should have the appropriate context. When delving into a cloud project, a project manager who is less experienced in IT-related matters should set aside time to also orient themselves with the learning necessary.

Learning and project management can be executed concurrently, although this will also depend on the deadlines put on the team and the team itself on how ready they are based on their cloud background as well. If the team members are well-prepared to perform their specific roles for the cloud project based on their background, you can also rely on their advice if you are still in the process of orienting yourself. It is imperative to understand how to coordinate your time to manage deadlines and your time spent learning well when doing so.

5. Do you find a challenge with Cloud being able to support a robust testing environment?

In my experience, there have not been many problems with the cloud supporting a robust testing environment, given that tests can be performed on the pipeline as part of the build process of software. In most cases, testing languages and frameworks will be supported, and this is also supported by the failover and other configurations set if there is a problem within what has been deployed on the production or testing environments.

The problem lies more on the need to test in more areas, including with security considerations on cloud deployment, live upgrades, and third-party dependence. These factors affect the extent to which we need to consider our checks. Luckily, there are also various cloud tools that help with this as well; so despite the more robust testing needed due to this, proper understanding about the cloud environment and extensive research should be able to address this requirement properly.

6. Is there any free source on the internet for getting basic knowledge about cloud systems?

Often, I would recommend vendor-specific resources to learn about cloud systems such as from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure resources directly, as doing this both allows you to study from material of great quality and gain in-depth knowledge into a specific cloud provider. You could then consider taking a foundational level certification to validate your knowledge. For more general cloud knowledge, there are free courses available on providers such as Udacity or on YouTube explaining many important concepts that need to be understood about the cloud.

The important thing to understand about the cloud is that many providers – despite the different features with each of the services they offer – offer services that are fundamentally delivering the same purpose. Because of this, applying cloud concepts when having to jump from one platform to another is going to be much simpler than having to learn cloud systems from scratch. Therefore, it is important to note that learning for one provider will not restrict your knowledge; it is simply ensuring you specialize in one but also gain general knowledge that can be applied to another platform should it be necessary to change to another provider.

Presentations including mine will be on demand through 31 January 2023. Visit PMI Virtual Experience Series 2022 for more details.