Project Management

My Agile slides now Available in CC!

You can use them, you can change them, you can trash them I hope that in a way or in another these slide can help you!

Agile: The Board Game, board prototype

Just screenshots. More details about next week’s post!

IAD 2011 – Lesson Learned: Anti-IF campaign, A3, Lean, Kaizen, Agile Coaching and UX

I’m on train returning to home after a beautiful and really interesting day at the Italian Agile Day – http://www.agileday.it. The event is self organized and rocks!

The agenda was rich of interesting themes - http://www.agileday.it/front/programma-2011. I’ve made difficult choices (and I missed the keynote …):

• Is Software Evolution really Effective? - Francesco Cirillo - fcgarage.com
• Lean, A3 e Kaizen - Claudio Perrone - twitter.com/#!/agilesensei
• A soft skill suitcase - Fabio Armani –  open-ware.org
• UX e sviluppo agile - Renato Mancuso
• LEGO Agile prototyping - Alessandro Graps (I missed this last one because the train… but the abstract was promising) - nothingnessit.wordpress.com

All of the speaker were really effective and inspired me for my future personal development:

• www.antiifcampaign.com: improve the adoption of Object Oriented techniques removing bad, dangerous and not necessary IFs. This helps to keep code simple and clean and reduce the evolutionary cost of the system. Not all Agile teams keep this attention on code and the fact that the code, at the end of the project, will continue to evolve. If the code is well written the maintenance and evolution cost less than the code base, if the code is bad written (IF code) the evolution of the system will cost more than the project itself!
• How much the evolutionary software does it cost? Too much! Francesco Cirillo is collecting historical data and he is observing that the adoption of Agile techniques without keeping always the contact with the real world is increasing the cost of projects, especially in mature Agile teams. He advises to revisit eXtreme Programming techniques and to follow the Anti-IF campaign.
• A3 Thinking is a Lean technique used to implement Plan-Do-Check-Act.
• 5 Whys is a very effective way to do retrospective.
• Management on Agile enterprises don’t blame, are not friends (like a big family) and are not absent; they work actively to remove impediments serving agile teams.
• Lean is soft on people and hard on processes.
• Lean means make money through people development. Claudio Perrone said.
• UX (User eXperience) can be combined with an Agile approach. Renato Mancuso advises to run a Sprint #0 where the UI vision is described and shared. During the next sprints define UIs first, together with developers, and after implement them.
• Balsamiq is a good sketch tool that helps to create Mockups.
• To be a coach you have to study and practice a lot! Fabio Armani indicates several interesting books to read: The Kaizen Way, Growing Agile leaders, Thinker Toys, Getting Things Done, 7 Habits and more (I’ll check the Fabio’s presentation when it will be available).

All of these lesson learned in just 4 hours of conference! What a great day.

Contracting in Complex Project – Apache HTTP Server, a case study

This is my presentation at PMI-NIC conference on Complex Project Management held in Milan Nov 11th 2011.

I’m participating to a group of study on Resilient Contracting with the aim of investigating the ways to manage a contract where the project is complex and cannot be planned upfront.

In the below slides I have presented how the Open Source community has addressed this problem moving from the contract game approach to a collaborative game where only the background rules are defined and the ethic and willingness of giving emerge.

Agile: The Board Game – the board concept

Here are two sketch of the board. The idea is that you draw a card with the project vision and than you start:

1. Project Vision Analysis with a Idea Clustering Brainstorming
2. Product Feature expressed in User Stories
3. Estimation with Poker Game and Story point + Estimation with PERT Three-Point method + Estimation with Montecarlo Analysis
4. Project Budget, Release Plan and FTE calculation (this is not really Agile but help with the management communication)
5. Execution in sprint  (see the sketch): sprint planning part1 and part2, execute with lego, review meeting, retrospective meeting with 5why analysis (yes this is Scrum).
6. Every 5 minutes roll a dice and draw a risk/opportunity card. This card may influence the sprint or the product backlog.
7. At the closure: lesson learned, celebrate and project closure

Agile: The Board Game – first concept in action

In this first week of work we have produced a concept of Agile: The board game and tested it on a sprint. Here are some photos of the test session. The sprint execution has been done using lego. The project will be available as open source in the mid of November 2011 here https://code.google.com/p/agile-the-board-game

Standard VS Standard – PMI North Italian Chapter Conference, September 23 2011

It has been an interesting conference. I’d like to share my 25′ presentation about Agile methodologies.

Useful links to start with Agile

Do you want to start with an Agile Project? Are you sure that you and your organization is ready? My advice: start reading these documents on the Net and after join some group on agile and ask for advice, don’t do it by yourself: Agile is simple and do things with simplicity is one of the most hard thing in the world

• http://agilemanifesto.org/iso/it/principles.html
• http://www.implementingscrum.com/section/blog/cartoons/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_IT
• http://www.lean.org/
• http://www.scrumalliance.org/
• http://www.gettingagile.com/2007/10/05/building-a-definition-of-done/

Agile Project Management – Course Abstract – ITA

I’m happy to share the abstract of my Agile course. Updates will coming soon! Have fun

PMBoK and Scrum – Part 1

PMI and Scrum are the pillars for my work.

The PMBoK – see wikipedia – is the most complete framework available to define processes for Project Management. It offers several tools for requirements, project execution, monitor and control, risk and quality management, team management and communication. Be aware that a project is a chaotic process, very difficult to manage, it’s a great advantage. PMBoK help the PM, the Client and the Team during all project phases. Applying these guidelines, adapted to the company environment, has helped me several time.

But PMI framework, in chaotic environments, such software development of innovative products, has some limits:

1. Great control of Cost, Scope and Time but less flexibility during project execution and adaptability of clients needs
2. Few tips on team building
3. Not oriented to value

Some times I participated to projects successfully completed from the KPI’s perspective but never used because the needs are changed. The problem of needs definition it is not so easy… and say that the client is the only responsible for requirements doesn’t help. If you have a client satisfied the next time he/she has a need he/she will ask your help, your partnership, your experience. If the client is not really satisfied he/she will not trust you completely.

Agile Manifesto - http://agilemanifesto.org – is the most simple and concise way to express these concepts!

Scrum is born from Agile values and from Lean principles – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development.

Reduce the waste and focus on business value is something that Client really appreciate! The problem here is how to really implement Scrum?

Scrum needs a real involvement of clients and companies. Several time this is not possible. Several time cost leadership is most important than value. Some time clients don’t have time to follow your project as Scrum requires.

In all of these cases PMBoK helps a lot: you can use the governance principles of PMI and apply Agile and Lean where are more effective.

In the next posts I’ll explain how I’ve implemented this in my projects.