Project Management

To hit pay dirt

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Hi to all of you, and welcome to this blog about management, projects, IT, etc. and about life among all of that. I'd like to share my thoughts, knowledges, experiences and to propose them for discussions.

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How to quickly and efficiently align documents

Some of you know how hard could be to fix up with customer (especially in a large company) a lot of documents when they are part of your procurement. 

You have to correct them again and again...to have discuss them with a lot of people, which can have some different opinions about the same things, which can have some different interests. 

But how could you make this process working quickly?

I have developed a habit over the years of working in consulting to do the following things:

  1. To form a working group of experts, decision-makers in the case of a large project we need to establish several working groups.
  2. For each direction must be the person responsible for the direction and possessing powers of decision-making in contentious situations.
  3. Prepare the first edition of documents, and send them to the customer for given feedback.
  4. Give feedback from all of people which take part in the fix up.
  5. Write records of all observations in the table, record the answers to all remarks and add comments, especially if you don't agree with observation.
  6. Change documents and send them again to the customer.
  7. Organize meeting and discuss the documents, try to make the positive decision. 
  8. If the positive decision didn't find on meeting, you have to distinguish controversial aspects with description their solution ways.
  9. All final decisions must be agreed by the management Committee of this project and approved by the responsible for the project from the customer.

This is easily done when you have professionals in the field of project management, project office, and very difficult when they are not.

But some organizations don't follow project management processes, and they don't have project management professionals, techniques. And what can we see?

I was convinced on own experience, doing projects for two different large organizations. In one of them the specialists have been trained in project management according to PMBOK, the other heard nothing about it. In the first case, it was not difficult to organize the work properly and perform it easily. In the second case, it took some time on the organization of work on the project from the customer, as it was necessary to actually teach the ideology of project management and operation, as well as to overcome resistance and reluctance to change work style. But and one, and in another case, in the end, the process of working on documents was reduced to the mentioned steps.

I'll be glad to get your feedback.

Thank you for reading this.

Success to all of you. 

Posted on: November 23, 2017 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Some words on memory about Russian writer

Yesterday, passed away the Russian writer, Daniil Granin (1919-2017), who had written, for my oppinion, the fundamental book in the Russian time management "This strange life".

This book tells us about the Alexander Lubishchev, Soviet scientist. Alexander Lubishchev devoted his life to science, including the study of using time. Alexander Lyubischev had made a monitoring and accounting time during of all his life. It had allowed him to achieve greater productivity of his activities in various fields of philosophy, biology, and entomology.

Thanks to the book of Daniil Granin method of using time-keeping has been widespread, and nowadays many of the developing and implementing time management systems use it as their basis.

My personal experience of how to improve the own efficiency with timing, I had described in my blog (https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/24731/-Its-a-magic-time---).

The rules of timekeeping in the company will help you to evaluate the work activities. It will also increase productivity, as well as the possibility of introducing an incentives and rewards system.

However, you should be careful with using these tools because people usually do not like when they don’t feel free.  That is why the most effective will be the introduction of timing as a work culture, and as a means for all employees to benefit from it.

If anyone had not read this book, I highly recommend to read.

https://www.litmir.me/br/?b=226757&p=1

If you need a translation, write about it in comments, I could post book here in parts.

Posted on: July 05, 2017 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It's a magic time...

Recently I was actually in a situation very tight deadline and a too brief time. Except my mains projects I was attracted to work as an analyst for a large Federal project. And I had had to develop subsystem decomposition, description of the components and modules, and clarification of details and preparation of the final document in the two days.

I knew I must calculate my power for doing all work in time and with a high quality, and also I knew I must don’t work at night, and leave a little time to rest. I was decided to count the time and monitor them during work. I must have had to create eighteen schemes and their descriptions.

I created one and write the begin time and the end time. Then I made the same with another, because they could have had the different complexity.

I must have had to create eighteen schemes and their descriptions.

Then I made the same with another, because they could have had the different complexity.

After that I knew average time. And I developed my plan, I calculated time worked on each scheme and on its description accordingly with the complexity of the schemes.  The remaining time was planned under the necessary things, including eating, taking some rest, and sleep.

At the end of the second day I was finished the whole job. The secret is, as I think, that in these two days I had not spent unnoticed, perhaps, not one minute, not what hours.

Of course, such strict regulations are not always needed, but it allows you to gather, concentrate and to complete the job.

Measurement time is necessary for management yourself, for work management. And there are different ways to use it for the different types of work.

The time is magic, if you want to do something you will do it.

Posted on: March 08, 2017 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Scrum vs Kanban vs XP

At work I was being asked to say about differencies between Scrum, Kanban and eXtreme Programming. And I'd like to share my thoughts with you. 

  Scrum Kanban XP (eXtreme Programming)
Goal Use of cross-functional, self-organized, and empowered teams who divide
their work into short, concentrated work cycles called Sprints
To alleviate  impediments that cause us to take longer to deliver, not remove necessary pieces of the process. To organize people to produce higher-quality software more productively.
Date of birth In the mid 80’s, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka defined a flexible and all-inclusive product
development strategy where the development team works as a unit to reach a common goal. Scrum has
increased in popularity and is now the preferred project development methodology for many organizations
globally. 
Kanban developed in the 1940s as a subcomponent of the Toyota Production System and has its origins in these Lean and Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing processes. XP has been created  in 1996 by Kent Beck during his work on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) payroll project.
Current state The Scrum framework can only be used for small projects. However, it can easily be
scaled for effective use in large projects. 
One of the reasons many groups implement Kanban is to figure out how to deliver more consistently. Kanban, as well as many other methods/processes, is often chosen and implemented by the management or leadership layer and the values and goals are communicated down to developers or other individual contributors. It's a very effective metodology for the small command programmers. Team size should be 5 or less people.
Speciality A key strength of Scrum lies in its use of cross-functional, self-organized, and empowered teams who divide
their work into short, concentrated work cycles called Sprints. Scrum is one of the most popular Agile methodologies. It is an adaptive, iterative, fast, flexible, and effective
methodology designed to deliver significant value quickly and throughout a project. Scrum ensures
transparency in communication and creates an environment of collective accountability and continuous
progress. 
In Kanban the workflow is visualised: work is broken down into small, discrete items and written on a card which is stuck to a board; the board has different columns and as the work progresses through different stages (e.g. ready, in progress, ready for review etc) the card is moved accordingly.
In Kanban the number of items that can be in progress at any one time is strictly limited.
Extreme Programming is successful because it stresses customer satisfaction. Instead of delivering everything you could possibly want on some date far in the future this process delivers the software you need as you need it. Extreme Programming empowers your developers to confidently respond to changing customer requirements, even late in the life cycle.Extreme Programming emphasizes teamwork. Managers, customers, and developers are all equal partners in a collaborative team.
Values 1. Focus
2. Courage
3. Opennes
4. Commitment
5. Respect
1. Transparency
2. Agreement
3. Balance
4. Respect
5. Understanding
6. Leadership
7. Collaboration
8. Customer focus
9. Flow
1. Communication
2. Simplicity
3. Feedback
4. Courage
5. Respect
Principles 1. Roles Guide
2. Empirical Process Control
3. Self-organization
4. Collaboration
5. Value-based Prioritization
1. Start with what you do now
2. Agree to pursue incremental evolutionary change
3. Initially, respect all roles, responsibilities and job titles
The principles that form the basis of XP are based on the values just described and are intended to foster decisions in a system development project. The principles are intended to be more concrete than the values and more easily translated to guidance in a practical situation.
Roles Core Roles:
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Scrum Team
Non-core Roles:
Stakeholders
Scrum Guidance Body
Vendors
Chief Product Owner
Chief Scrum Master
No existing roles. Some teams enlist the help of an agile coach. Tracker, Customer, Programmer, Coach, Manager, Tester. Anyone can be Doomsayer, Gold Owner (may be the same as the Customer)
Key metrics Sprint Velocity (2 weeks) Cycle time Iteration time (2 weeks)
Activities 1. Initiate
2. Plan and Estimate
3. Implement
4. Review and Retrospect
5. Release
1. To Do
2. Development
3. Test
4. Release
5. Done
1. Planning
2. Managing
3. Designing
4. Coding
5. Testing
Practices 1. Planning
2. Daily Scrum
3. Review and retrospective: Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective
4. Extension: Backlog reinement and Scrum of Scrums
5. Artifacts: Product Backlog, Management, Sprint Backlog, Product Increment, Extensions (Sprint burn-down chart, Release burn-up chart)
1. Visualize
2. Limit Work-in-progress
3. Manage Flow
4. Make management policies explicit
5. Improve collaboratively (using models and the scientific method)
Extreme Programming has 12 practices, grouped into four areas, derived from the best practices of software engineering:
Fine scale feedback:
Pair Programming
Planning Game
Test Driven Development
Continuous process:
Continuous Integration
Design Improvement
Small Releases
Whole Team
Shared understanding:
Coding Standards
Collective Code Ownership
Simple Design
System Metaphor
Programmer welfare:
Sustainable Pace
Change philosophy Teams should strive to not make changes to the sprint forecast during the sprint. Doing so compromises learnings around estimation. Change can happen at any time. A high degree of developer discipline along with continuous customer involvement for the duration of the project. 
Cadence Regular fixed length sprints.  Continuous flow. Iteration.
Release methodology At the end of each sprint if approved by the product owner. Continuous delivery or at the team's discretion. At the end of iteration.

So, there are different methodologies you can use to manage project.
I think the main weakness in all these methodologies is poor knowledge about product. And sometimes we are trying to develop existence products when we need to create new system.
We need to choose methodology or to combine methodology tools in depending from kind of project and its scope. We need to take cognisances of experience, qualifications and conditions.

 

Posted on: October 07, 2016 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)
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