Agility and Project Leadership

In line with last month’s theme of personal project management, I found this interesting post on using Scrum for the planning and managing of the arrival of a new baby.  Here’s a great snapshot of the makeshift tasks board used for the planning, prioritizing and tracking of tasks:

As the mid-year rolls around for all of us, if you are part of a large organization this is typically the time a mid-year performance appraisal and evaluation takes place for the majority of you.  These annual to bi-annual performance appraisals are are a stressful event for both the evaluator and evaluatee since it determines your ability to obtain bonuses, merit increases, promotions and in the worst situation, whether you will keep your job or not.

But how does this work for Agile/Scrum teams where team members are self-organizing, which implies the ability to harmonize and work together as a collective rather than relying on individual performance, to deliver those working deliverables at the end of each iteration?

The daily stand-up meeting is one of the most famous and important ideas behind Scrum, since this is the mechanism that allows structured communications and work alignments between team members.  It has become such an infamous notion that I ran across an article on the Wall Street Journal talking about this.  The title of the article is “No More Angling for the Best Seat; More Meetings Are Stand-Up Jobs” and it describes how various software firms around the US are utilizing the daily stand-up meeting:

• A stand-up meeting is not a status meeting, but rather actionable items based on what was done, what needs to be done, and what is (possibly) getting in the way.  Your job as Scrum Master is to ensure it stays in this direction and that you commit to removing the impediments.
• Don’t allow teams to stray into technical minutiae as that will eat up time and distract or bore other team members.  Park those items for later follow ups and make sure only the technical SMEs are involved
• Make sure the Product Owner is there to answer any questions regarding requirements and backlog items
• As Scrum Master, keep a list of impediments that is prioritized on criticality and be able to speak to the status of them at any time
• Try to have the meetings at the same time and ensure that all team members remain till the end of the meeting.
• If the ScrumMaster and/or the Product Owner cannot attend, keep the meeting anyway to maintain communication, consistency and discipline (again, just because Agile is flexible does not mean it is not disciplined!)

Saw this post on Wall Street Journal about GE going more Agile.  It states that GE: 

Started down this path several years ago and IT organizations within various divisions are making the transition to this approach at different rates...  this methodology let the IT department complete a project around business analytics for the finance department, from start to finish, in a year, far less than the 18-24 month time frame its consultants and vendors would have taken using a more conventional approach.

The goal of the project was to make it easier to slice and dice financial information so that executives would have better information with which to make decisions. The project involved taking information from different systems and making sure the data could be read by the new software. The team also worked with partners in finance to determine their needs, and included review and testing phases to make sure the software was giving accurate results.

It goes on to elaborate how GE held internal conferences with big name Agile industry gurus as well as hiring Rally software to consult for them on the Agile transition.  Interestingly and telling, was a comment left on the article by a reader who states that GE Healthcare is hardly Agile as it proclaims:

For those who attended my presentation on “Managing Agility: Embracing the Benefits of Agile Leadership” at the PMXPO 2012, I want to thank you again for attending and Gantthead for the opportunity.  Unfortunately there was not enough time to answer all the questions that came in and there were quite a bit of them: 37 to be exact (question directly asking me about Agile specifics), which is quite a bit considering the majority of them came in after the presentation during the last 20 minutes!

Fortunately though, Erin DeCaprio the fabulous Gantthead MC, provided me the questions and contacts and I will answer all of them directly.  What I’d like to do here is to summarize, categorize and evaluate the questions, as I feel it really reveals the concerns of real world PMs working out there in the trenches like myself and how we go about integrating and leading Agile project initiatives.

Here’s the breakdown from the highest to the lowest:

Though this is a small sample and was not based on a formal survey and anecdotal, as a fellow PM working in a traditional PM environment I can assert that these are my very own concerns and the same concerns of other PMs I work with and know!

I work in the medical device industry that has heavy regulatory and compliance checkpoints that overshadow all the projects I’m involved with that is not always conducive or easy to just “throw” Agile at something to make it turn around faster.

But like every other industry out there these days, there still a need to turn products and services around faster and keep up with the pace of technological innovations, hence an imperative to be more Agile.

In any event, I will answer questions directly to the respondents and as a regular writer on this excellent site, I have lots of topics to focus on since I have a much better idea of what concerns the Gantthead user base.