Tagged with: agile • culture • flexibility • frame of reference • guest post • routine • rules
** This is a guest post by John P Vajda, PMP. Find out more about John at the bottom. **
How does one become more Agile? The question beckons any project manager worth his/her weight in PMP training books. We all ask ourselves how we can better deal with uncertainty. How can we embrace the unknown and move forward? How can we be more predictive, and better to adapt to changes? Is this just a project question, or is this a question that weights on us everyday as human beings?
The mission statement if you will of Project Shrink is “Projects are about humans, we help you deal with that” This is where I begin my blog.
Image by Glutnix.
We Want A Challenge With Rules
Humans like routine; it’s animalistic in nature to want a repetitive action to fulfill daily. We like the known, the obvious, but we like problem solving. As we problem solve we also like understanding our problems by using empirical data to drive quantitative and qualitative analysis. The bottom line: we want a challenge but want rules to play by. Like a game of Chess, or Risk, we want a challenge but want a framework to work in. We want to know that with every challenge there is a rule book in that game box that we can refer to for “clarification” We ask ourselves “What happens when you roll matching 6s on the dice, does the attacking army win or the defending army?” Without this rulebook this question goes unanswered, and chaos in sues on the game board.
At this point you are asking yourself, “What does this have to do with Project Management in Agile environment?” To answer that question, please turn to page 21 of your Agile rule book. Yes, and here in-lies the problem. Agile isn’t like PMP, where we have explicit processes laid out in front of us, explaining the 44 processes broken down by 9 process areas, fitting into 5 project management phases. Agile isn’t about rules, or if/then statements, or inputs and outputs. It has a framework, but that framework is based on the ability to take information, process it quickly and make rapid change and action occur. All while doing what is best for the project, and considering the customer needs. Oh, the customer we forgot about them, during our study of the processes of project management.
The Agile World
It is critical in an Agile World to take real time feedback, analyze, and apply it immediately. It is critical to keep the team informed, and allow people to weigh in. Taking all this feedback and using probabilistic schedule approach will allow you to move through your schedule with utmost flexibility and efficiency. Social media is the single greatest asset in an Agile World. Crowd sourcing, micro blogging, customer focus groups, face to face communication, real time collaboration, are all critical to the success of an Agile team.
I ask myself is it indicative of human beings to be truly Agile? I think we have to train ourselves to be OK with uncertainty, to embrace change, to allow the “community” to share feedback, and to break the restrictions of a PMP world. How does one do this? By taking everything you know about project management and rethinking how you handle uncertainty and the “crowd”. If you embrace uncertainty, and work to reduce it through your project life cycle, you can truly become Agile. If you find the best ways to extract information and feedback from your “crowd” you can harness the team in new ways. Finally, as you move closer to certainty, you have to be discipline to keep the key ingredients, backlog the rest, and toss the left-overs in the garbage. Humans are pack rats by nature, so we have re-think how we like to horde our supplies for a famine; we have to be ok with reducing scope, or backlogging functionality and moving forward. We have to give up the surplus.
Agile is a frame of mind, and that frame is not yet clearly laid out in front of us in a manual. I think Agile is a different way of thinking for a different software world. Embrace uncertainty, love your community, and become OK with the unknown: Be truly agile.
About the author: John P Vajda works as a Project Manager at Oracle Corporation*, and is becoming more Agile everyday.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpvajda
* The statements in this blog do not reflect that of Oracle Corporation, and are solely those opinions and thoughts of John P Vajda.
You already mentioned the framework for agile problem solving: It's the set of values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto. When you say the agile frame of mind is “not yet clearly laid out in front of us in a manual,” the word “yet” worries me. The moment such a manual appears, it will end the agile frame of mind.
the Agile Manifesto is great no doubt, but like the Declaration of Independence (US) it led (or will lead) to other documents defining what it truly means to say “We the People”
That is analogy, but having more definition around what it means to be AGILE isn't necessarily bad, There are fundamental processes that are taught and shared between teams everyday, with the caveat that processes aren't always AGILE. I think if we train ourselves to always be adaptive and learning, we can follow “manuals” knowing they are just a guideline, but not the absolute solution to our ever changing project problems. Thanks for the feedback!
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