Agile Strategy Maintain a “big picture” view of the whole project (the technical and business sides) and keep it in front of the team. This provides a medium for soliciting high-level input from team members, as well as the opportunity for encouraging deeper engagement by individuals because they can see how their contributions fit into the larger picture.
One of the more frustrating project management duties is collecting the information necessary to track progress against the plan. This basically involves determining whether tasks have been completed as planned or are on track to be completed as planned, and if not, why and what is being done about it. In most cases, team members do not voluntarily come forward to report their individual status to the project manager. This results in one or both of the following scenarios. First, the project manager must follow up with each individual and ask about the status of their tasks. This never seems to be very comfortable, especially when tasks are behind schedule, and it certainly is not efficient for the project manager. Second, the project manager can call a meeting with the whole team at once, to review the status of all open tasks. This is more efficient for the project manager but highly inefficient for the team members. Valuable time during team meetings should be reserved for critical discussion, analysis, and brainstorming that can benefit from the synergy of the whole team and not be wasted on mundane status collection activities. This seemingly basic project management activity can seriously bog down a project if not handled properly. Creating a status collection process during the project definition stage, discussing it with the team, and including it in the project communications plan will go a long way toward increasing agility.
Agile Strategy Define, discuss, and gain up-front agreement on a mechanism/practice that sets expectations regarding how and when individuals will report on the status of their tasks. You’ll gain across-the-board efficiency during project execution as a result.
Lessons Learned
It goes without saying that mistakes will be made when operating in an uncertain environment. The trick, of course, is to learn as much as possible from each misstep, adding to the knowledge base of the organization and, hopefully, not making the same mistake again. There are three parts to the basic lessons learned process. First, develop an environment that supports continual learning. Second, capture key lessons learned. And third, archive, organize, and make these learnings accessible to current and future project teams.
Many organizations believe that they are too busy to spend time looking back. They think it’s a waste of time, or worse, they are embarrassed to bring attention to poor behavior, decisions, or performance. Breaking this type of culture will go a long way toward improving both short-term and long-term success in the agile environment. The agile project operates in an atmosphere of high interactivity, boundary crossing, and multiple simultaneous pathways. Team members need to have conviction in their opinions, be able to consider alternative viewpoints, and come to agreeable conclusions among themselves. In a nutshell, they need to be able to work effectively together. While this is the case in almost all of business, it is emphasized here because of the higher levels of interaction among team members who, perhaps, are not used to working together. By inserting lessons learned sessions (either periodically or at major milestones) into your overall project plan, you will be putting the team on notice that their actions will be reviewed and captured. When organizations first start this process, it tends to gravitate toward team dynamics, both positive and negative, as the team learns how to work together in the agile paradigm. Once the interpersonal dynamics are worked out, the lessons learned tend to shift toward technical and business decision making, but by this time your team will be well on its way to becoming truly effective in the agile environment.
Agile Strategy Support and allocate time for a consistent “lessons learned” process. By creating an environment of intrateam- and self-accountability, you will accelerate the development of effective working relationships among your team members.
Effectively and efficiently capturing the lessons learned from your projects is the key enabler to making this process successful. There are numerous ways to perform this process, but key elements are that it must be easy to use, take minimal time, have full involvement, and provide fast feedback to the participants. Without at least touching on these areas, the process can become too drawn out and analytic for the agile project, thus stalling its progression, rather than accelerating it. The goals should be to quickly capture what went well and what could be improved. There should be a brief discussion on the results, and then the team should move on. Some action items may be assigned as an output from the process, but they should not hinder forward progress of the overall project or the next project. If you already have a lessons learned process, take a look at it from the agile perspective and consider the aforementioned points. As a target, try to limit team involvement in the process to one to two hours total. If you go over two hours, the process will get too heavy for the agile environment, and you’ll need to make some modifications. If you don’t currently have a formal process, an example is included at the end of this chapter that can be used as a starting point for you to customize to your project environment.
Finally, archiving, organizing, and communicating your lessons learned will be a foundation of your long-term success. Certainly, results should be immediately communicated to the participants via e-mail or other project communication. However, teams should be able to learn from the lessons of other teams as well as their own. Creating some type of online and organized archive system is the best way to do this. Knowledge management is a relatively sophisticated topic unto itself and is not discussed here, however, I discuss the basics of a manual project management infrastructure that would cover the long-term archiving and accessibility of lessons learned in Chapter 10.
Interpersonal Skills
The successful agile project manager must balance the freedom required by highly creative teams with classic PM duties such as schedule tracking and progress reporting in order to drive the project forward. Solid interpersonal skills are essential to managing in the agile environment. A heavy-handed approach is rarely successful. The trick is to let the team run as free as possible, while maintaining the ability to pull them back in when necessary. However, relying solely on soft skills may not always be enough to pull off this critical balancing act. In addition to employing superior interpersonal skills, the project manager can play the roles and use the processes described in this chapter to stay on top of the project and establish the credibility with the team necessary to effectively lead it through the storm of uncertainty—and do it all without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Summary
The agile project manager’s role combines many duties and skills. The agile project manager:
Recognizes that agile projects will change direction often through the course of the project
Takes an outward-facing perspective to scan the external environment for influences that will affect the project, subsequently bringing these elements back to the project team
Is more of a facilitator than a manager
Acts as an intelligent information manifold
Proactively works to build relationships with project stakeholders during the calm times of the project
Uses “gap filling” as a means to add value and become more integrated in technical projects
Maintains a “big picture” view of the project for the team
Facilitates the activities and interactivities of individual team members
Champions the development of organizational project knowledge through the lessons learned process
Combines solid interpersonal skills, a light-handed approach, and the roles described in this chapter to effectively drive the project forward
The Lessons Learned Process (aka the Retrospective or Sunset Review)
Emerging and agile organizations developing new project management tools and processes will inevitably go through some iteration as the new PM processes are tuned to their project and business environment. The fast pace of the agile environment often encourages us to forget mistakes and just move on. While this approach is probably more efficient at solving the immediate problem at hand, it is generally detrimental to the long-term optimization of the organization’s PM infrastructure, as well as its ability to effectively define, plan, and execute projects. The process described here is designed to be a “light” process that can be easily and frequently applied to capture the lessons learned from our most recent events and projects. An electronic copy of this process can be downloaded from http://www.xocp.com.
Introduction
Purpose
The purpose of the Lessons Learned process is to capture best practices and improvement areas upon the completion of a project, major milestone, or substantial event, so that problems can be addressed and successes repeated in the future.
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