In this blog post Matimba explores the Waterfall, Scrum, Water-Scrum-Fall conundrum and identifies the classic things you need to get right as a Project Manager, to deliver successful projects.
In the act of delivering projects, project managers juggle five key items: Money, Time, Scope, People and Risk. Underestimating any of these five items or dropping the ball, can lead to costly rework, under-delivery or the canning of your project.
Are all projects roughly the same? Well, they typically fall into two broad categories:
(1) Projects you can predict
In predictive projects e.g. Business as Usual projects or projects that an organisation has done before like a system upgrade; you typically define scope, identify milestones and tasks, select a team, create a plan and then decide your budget and timeline.
(2) Adaptive Projects
In adaptive projects e.g. Greenfield or brand new projects that haven't been attempted before; like building a new software product; you're often given a product to create, a timeline, a budget and a team. The responsibility is then yours to identify issues to be solved, fail fast and adapt scope as you iterate to the product finish line.
Ok, so what project method should you use to deliver your project? It depends!
Waterfall, Agile & Hybrid
Predictive projects usually use the Waterfall approach. Waterfall projects generally answer the question why and what well, because of their formal, sequential thinking and process i.e. why are we doing this project and what should we do, but may take too long given their emphasis on planning, the critical path, sequencing and their lack of flexibility to adapt to new requirements or a rapidly changing environment.
In contrast, adaptive projects, typically follow the Agile approach. They enable an exploratory, team based, daily process that is agile, flexible and responsive to change. They answer the question how, very well, but may lose sight of the bigger picture: the why, the what and integration, especially when part of a large programme, running multiple adaptive projects that need to integrate.
Some organisations and projects are not wholly predictive or wholly adaptive and some can benefit from a bit of both, especially in organisations that are used to waterfall, new to agile and struggling to transition. Don't worry. That’s ok!
If you want to know more about Waterfall, Agile or Hybrid, what frameworks should you become more familiar with?
Waterfall:
Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) (11), PMBOK or PRINCE2.
Agile :
Ability to adjust project quickly based on changing environment: Scrum, Kanban, Feature Driven Development (FDD), Extreme Programming (XP).
Hybrid:
Lean-agile, water-scrum-fall: Sometimes the reality and often desirable (7),(10).
In all three, the full buy in of a Project Sponsor or Product Owner and the team, is critical to the success of the ultimate project and needs to be nailed at the outset of the initiative, so that when the obstacles come (and they will), there is a committed force to make things happen.
A Project, Scrum or Team Lead should have the following basic knowledge (which can be crammed in a weekend ;)):
Learn the basics of Lean enterprise practices (1),(9)
Be aware of the key points of agile frameworks such as Scrum (4)
Be aware of the key components of popular project management methods such as PRINCE2 (5) and PMBOK (6)
Understand why you are not following recommended practices from Scrum, PRINCE2 and/or PMBOK, if that is your choice i.e. map them to your organisation!
Like a story — every project has a Beginning, Middle and End. The basic project stages and some of the key deliverables (loosely based on PMBOK and PRINCE2) are:
Pre-project (Feasibility)
- Project Sponsor/Product Owner Buy In
- Project mandate/business case
- Agree on people required to initiate the project
- Define product description/project scope (see “Working Backwards” (3))
- Define deliverables
- Understand where the project lies in terms of business priorities
Project Initiation (Planning)
- Define key decision makers (project board, steering group)
- Assign project team
- Approve budget/business case (even if at very high level)
- Project roadmap/plan (keep high level and identify uncertainties and how to handle them)
- Clarify work practices, project communication, governance, tools to use
Delivery: Design and Build (Execution)
- Track work packages, Daily Scrum
- Stage/Sprint - planning, review, product demos
- Unit testing and User Acceptance testing (UAT)
Final delivery (Closing)
- Post go-live support (PGLS) or Hyper-care
- Handover to support organisation
- Continuous improvement
What rarely works
- No Sponsor, Wrong Sponsor or no Buy In from Sponsor/Product Owner
- Excessive planning (if major uncertainties exist)
- Starting the project without key resources
- More than one person responsible for the same task
- Microsoft Project! Most stakeholders don't have it and if too detailed it eats time!
What mostly works
- Sponsor who champions the project and will move mountains if needed
- Early id of sub-projects or streams
- More than one product/business owner, if more than one product involved
- Quick wins (if Waterfall project)
- Daily standup/scrum with relevant product owner and/or delivery team
- Up to date single list of tasks / issues / product backlog
- Awareness by everyone at all times of the high-level project roadmap/plan and their key deliverables
- Keep each project stage/sprint to 4 weeks or less, to keep momentum
- Have regular product demos/deliverables (e.g. end of every stage/sprint)
- If in doubt, reduce scope (8)
Here's to you and your projects' success!
REFERENCES
(1)
Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale
Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly
This book is a must read! A 110p excerpt is available from publisher website.
www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Enterprise-Performance-Organizations-Innovate/dp/1449368425
(2)
Main stages of a project (Prince2)
http://prince2.wiki/Processes [prince2.wiki]
(3)
Working Backwards
Werner Vogels - 2006
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backwards.html [allthingsdistributed.com]
(4)
The Scrum Guide
Available for download on site below. About 19 pages — no excuse not to read this!
https://www.scrumguides.org/ [scrumguides.org]
(5)
PRINCE2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRINCE2 [en.wikipedia.org]
(6)
PMBOK / PMP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Management_Body_of_Knowledge [en.wikipedia.org]
(7)
Challenges in the Transition from Waterfall to Scrum
http://referaat.cs.utwente.nl/conference/20/paper/7427/challenges-in-the-transition-from-waterfall-to-scrum-a-casestudy-at-portbase.pdf [referaat.cs.utwente.nl]
(8)
Project management triangle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle [en.wikipedia.org]
(9)
Lean enterprise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_enterprise [en.wikipedia.org]
(10)
Water-Scrum-Fall Is The Reality Of Agile For Most Organizations Today
Forrester - 2011
http://www.storycology.com/uploads/1/1/4/9/11495720/water-scrum-fall.pdf [storycology.com]
(11)
Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_development_life_cycle [en.wikipedia.org]
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Thank you for visiting our website. We at Matimba respect your right to privacy. We comply with our obligations under the Protection of Personal Information Act South Africa and with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EEA. Both are designed to protect individuals and their personal data. The purpose of this Privacy Statement is to set out how we deal with personal data provided to Matimba.
Please review this policy before agreeing that we can process your data.
Data Collection
Matimba collects both impersonal and personal data.
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Matimba’s security procedures protect data from being misused, misplaced, or accessed, changed or disclosed by unauthorised people. Your data can only be accessed by authorised personnel in order to provide you with recruitment and recruitment-related services.
Matching candidates with employers for new roles, is a matter of timing. For this reason we would normally retain relationship data on our database for a period of 3 years.
To further ensure the integrity of your data, you can get in touch with us at any time at anne@matimba.com, to:
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Transfer to/from EEA
Matimba operates in South Africa and in Ireland. We will inform you if we need to transfer data into (if a South African candidate) or out of (if an EEA candidate)the EEA, based on jobs you are applying for in or outside the EEA.
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