Scrum ?

P2P Global conference 2009

P2P 2009 Global project management conference is scheduled to be held in Cairo on 2nd, 3rd and 4th November at Hotel Marriot.
You can find more information about the conference on http://p2p.brisk-consulting.org/details_sp.php

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=98939890142&h=eeQVS&u=EwpyK&ref=mf

I will be addressing the conference in 3 sessions and I will be doing my presentations based on following abstracts.

Software project management in outsourced project environment and Risk mitigation.
Outsourced projects over geographical boundaries have been always a challenge when it comes to project management. Either large scale or small scale, the risk of the project failures remain the same.
The presentation will discuss the challenges which project managers’ may face for the projects outsourced over boundaries and the common risk factors based on experience gained by managing and consulting various outsourced projects over a decade for a global clientele.
The Risk involved in outsourced projects from both customer and the software vender, the culture difference and how to overcome issues, communication, working with time differences, working with unknown parties, trust, and security issues in such projects will be discussed in details.
Further the challenges in Agile and waterfall methods in outsourced project environments will also be discussed.
The topic will be much related to the connected chapters as emerging software outsourcing markets.

Introducing Scrum to Your Organization
Successfully introducing Scrum into a non-Agile environment can be a very complicated endeavor. This presentation will cover critical areas of focus, risks and challenges your organization may face when crossing the bridge to Agile. This lecture will include an examination of the transition to Agile from the perspective of the organization as a whole, as well as individual stakeholders.

Effective Communication When Using Scrum
Communication is an important aspect of project management. According to the PMBOK, Project Managers spend 80-90% of their time communicating. When working with a lightweight Agile framework like Scrum, the risk of miscommunication can increase significantly if you aren’t vigilant about your messaging. This session will discuss the opportunities and risks a project manager faces when working with the Scrum framework. Participants should leave this talk with a deeper understanding of the risks to watch out for, as well as the new opportunities for enhanced communication that are created by using one of the most popular Agile methodologies.

Its my first time to address such a big conference and I wish I have enough time for preparations. :-)

Project Management 2.0

The talk of the town ! Project Management 2.0 :-)
Yea we all know that Project management has moved a long way from traditional management and those long gone methods are not recognized anymore. The days that project manager becomes the center for all the information and he filters information for various stakeholders and make stake holder updates are long gone. In modern project management, information transparency is provided to all the stakeholders by the project itself and there is no central control of information by the project manager. Everybody becomes equally intelligent about the project and all the stakeholders contribute to the success of the project due to high degree of transparency.
Okiii…what’s so big about Project Management 2.0.? Actually I don’t see anything big .. But it’s a name given for using social media for project management ( I know Wiki will not tell you the exact words , But this is simply the idea about it .)
Oki.... this is what Wiki tells you..
“Project Management 2.0[1] (social project management[2]) is the natural evolution of project management practices brought by Web 2.0 technologies “
I think this is a very cool concept..You can see many project managers moving out of complex tools, stake holder reports, various templates to simple tools like Twitter , Wiki , facebook ??:-), blogs ..sounds funny ? No its not..
Ok I know your first question.. Where is the security of your project info?
You know that you can protect your twitter updates and discuss about the project status updates etc among the team members? Honestly I have not done that yet… but today I talked with one of my PM friends in Florida who does that in his projects.. When one of his team members travelling with a blackberry, instead opening a complex Excel sheet, he can get in to his favorite twitter.. How easy for you to see what happened in your project and status updates and with a simple twitter..?
(Oh I remember that I had a discussion with somebody lately about Twitter/ FB type look and feel for business applications.. And that person just ripped me off to pieces for bringing up this thinking for business applications… It just came to my mind when writing this post.. Anyway forget it ….not relevant here sorry …lets get back to Project Management 2.0 :)
I heard that most the complex tools even with portfolio management features are now trying to integrate with social media. Example :Facebook. .. Wow ..here you go…..
How does that happen..? hmmm ...I can use my fantasies and think of many ways..:-)
One thing I learned.. you can have facebooks created for your team working around the world., In a construction project, if you need to take pictures of current problems, installations, uploaded to the software and publish directly via facebook to your whole team located in several parts of the world. They will see all the updates instantly… Isnt it cool :-) ?
If you want to learn more about project management 2.0 there are lots of resources available in the web.., I find my friend, Cornelius’ latest 2 podcasts (find them at http://www.pmpodcast.com/) is really cool sources for this. At the same time I see Dave and many other professionals around the world posted some good stuff to the web. Ask Google more about it :-)

Revamping of Projectized..

Yesterday one of my colleagues was discussing some stuff on this blog and I got some exiting comments about how popular this is in some of the search engines. I was very happy by the comments because I can see over hundreds of people visiting this blog every day but very few times my colleagues refer to it or comment about it J So thanks for the comments..
Anyway I looked at this blog today and I think I need to care about her little more.. I just felt that I don’t give a fair care on it.. Obviously its due to my other priorities. Now it’s that high time I need to think of revamping the blog as.....

1. I earn from the blog more than I ever expected now. Thank you for my advertising sponsor and the kind readers who purchase the courses. I think this can be further improved.

2. I have messed up with blog links.. Many readers have commented that some of the links don’t work but I have been too bad I have not even replied to them with a thank you note and corrected those links.

3. Some outdated material need their reference to new material

4. My profile has been changed.. need updates

5. Need more linking up and some marketing gadgemetics inserted in this :-)

6. I should stop posting un related posts and be focused on PM posts

7. Im screwed up with tags.. I need to sort them out, which is number 1 priority.

8. I need to provide reference articles to blog posts for some of the sites who have requested them

9. Most importantly I need to link up with PMI chapter and blog

10. Need to do something to keep interactive with the readers.

Ok Im thinking to revamp it in 2010 :-)

Chapter Magazine

I joined PMI Colombo chapter at last :) after few friends pushed me so hard. :)!! True enough I have my plate full at this time.. But still I found some interest to join the Local PM community as I felt I could do something helpful for the PM professionals in SL via the chapter. So you will hear me whining about time more often now: D
Very first meeting was with few of the senior members of the chapter. They updated me with many things going on in the chapter such as education programs carried out by them, some initiatives to increase the number of certified Project managers in Sri Lanka and what really caught my attention was the concept of National PMO, Which I will not discuss here.
The Second meeting was more focused on how I should contribute to the chapter more actively.. there… I volunteered to get in to the publishing committee of the chapter and help them on the chapter web site and the new publications.
Ok now this is a good news for SL PMPs. I know all of you may not get an opportunity to publish your articles, case studies in PMI Network magazine. Simply because there are more than half a million members and credential holders in over 170 countries who may seek space in that. What we decided was to publish a local chapter magazine in order to provide that space for the SL PMPS who are willing to publish their articles, research work, case studies etc. This will be another channel for them to earn PDUs too. Initially this may be an e magazine.. I don’t know.. But the good thing is that I know we are definitely starting somewhere. The very first magazine may come up with few news columns and articles contributed by our known PMPs whom we can linked up with faster. Anyway all the SL PMPs can contribute to this chapter magazine and the articles will be selected and published by a committee. May be nothing much exiting to you yet.. But we need to have a start somewhere. Once we are organized I will publish an email address where other PMPs can contribute content to the magazine.

How to claim for 60 PDUs fast!

Are you a PMP ? Ok this is the most important post Im going to write in this blog for you .If you are also a PMP in my category who waited till the last moment to claim PDUs ( Please I don’t recommend that period! PMI can always reject what you claim so you need time for that) and in the mission of saving your title for another 3 years.. This post will sound music to you. First thank you Shawan Futter(http://www.theicpm.com/) ,Dr. Madhu and Cornelius (http://www.thepmpodcast.com/) for all the help. Ok Here we go. 15 points – Category 2 SDL If you are a regular listener of PMPodcast , (If not you can start now ) claim 15 points per one cycle.. (http://www.thepmpodcast.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=33) has more details 15 Points – Category 2h If you are really doing PM related work, you can claim 5 for each year so you got another 15. Now itself you got 30., ok the next 30 is the challenge.. I will do it and update the post.. :) wait ….
Here you go for the next 30..
10 Points – Category 2g
Have you done any research on new Project Management method or framework ? why not creating a presentation on that as training material and train your own colleagues ? Or if you are in to PM consultancy, you can use that for various teams training. There you can get 10 PDUs.

5 Points – Category 2 Activity
Create a Project Management forum in your own company with people who are interested to share knowledge and talk about Project Management related stuff. You are the moderator of this forum, have weekly meetings.. there you can collect 5 PDUs.

15 Points – category 5
This is really a good one . Under volunteer activity you know that you can claim PDUs for your PM subject specific blog? You can claim 5 points per year so you can get maximum of 15 points there. But be honest they do an audit J

There are many more available. If you are doing some formal higher studies on Project Management, if you do a research degree and publish journals, you can collect many PDUs easily. But above is the most easiest path I have found.

***************************************************************
Special note for Sri Lankan PMPs who will be losing their credentials soon…. I know there are lots of PMPs in SL right now.. and I know many of them are going to lose their credentials this year :) I was one of them before. Just like you guys, I also like to attend to worldwide seminars, conferences and earn PDUS but there is a big price to pay for these as we are located in SL. Traveling is very costly and these seminars are costly when you convert to Rupees. I know there are ways that you can purchase PM stuff, learn and then claim for PDUs. …Again you need money.. I know most of us are not invited to address our PM chapter dinners etc ;-) so we don’t get PDUs from that way. In the same time most of us have not written any books or published journals. Then how do we do this??? Don’t worry … Still you can claim for PDUs for what you have done .. Remember how hard it was for us to do this PMP exam.. Sooo many questions..PMBOK guides, online test exams, remembering inputs and outputs of each phase of the cycle ( Shoot me !! ) , Rita’s book.. oh its a nightmare.. So don’t lose what you have gained in hard way.. Actually I also believed that earning PDUs is unbelievably difficult task till few PMPs guided me on how to do this without spending any money. All what you have to do is all the days do your reading, participate online forums etc. , help other Project managers and practice as a Project Management professional. I specially thought to post this blog post for you guys to help to claim PDUs. I will improve this post to make it much more usable as much as information I find day by day…

SQL Server Books..

Okii.. This is not about Project Management.. But something which I think worth dedicating a post of my blog for.

In the past I’ve been very lucky to work with colleagues who have quite unique skills in IT industry and the guys who pitched the top in their own technical domains.. They have been always a great inspiration to me..

This is another breakthrough of one of my current colleagues at Exilesoft., He published 2 Books.. WOW can you believe this.. I hardly can write a half page blog post.. But this guy, having 2 small kids at home, doing really a good job at office.. wrote 2 books..Unbelievable... (Of course Sri Lankan men don’t work at home ;-) that’s a different story )

Check his books and his blog here..

http://dbfriend.blogspot.com/2009/02/two-books-from-sql-server-central.html

http://dbfriend.blogspot.com/2009/02/book-on-sql-server-replication.html

His blog http://databasenews24x7.blogspot.com/

He is a great inspiration to me !!! J and I wish him all the success. !

PMBOK guide for free..

You can download the 4th Edition of PMBOK guide free now..
To access the digital edition of the PMBOK® Guide:
Visit www.PMI.org
Logon to Your Members Area
Select the Resources tab
Go to Global Standards Library
Click on "Library of PMI Global Standards"
Click on "Projects (View Details)
Right Click on Language and select "Save Target As.."

New Scrum tool in the market - Agilo...

Good news is that I found this “seems to be cool “ Agile PM tool “Agilo”
http://www.agile42.com/cms/pages/tools/
The bad news is that they charge 29 Euro for 30 day trial.. Smart ha.. ;-)

Newbie to Agile.. Some random things based on my experience so far..

1. Scrum is only one of the Agile methods. There are many. But at the moment Scrum is the most popular due to its simplicity and not forgetting the scrum alliance marketing effort too.. ;-)

2. I had a situation where the product owner had an idea.. Agile is no documentation.. period!.. This is not right! If you look at what Agile Manifesto says “they prefer working software over comprehensive documentation and not over any documentation. The point is that more effort should be for making software and not for making documentation. But we always need simple good documentation in software. Which is a known factor.

3. Can the none technical Project Manager becomes the Scrum master? My answer is YES. But still if you have a choice, go for the technical guy. Because in Scrum the “Management “ is very less. All what you have is team work and coordination and resolving impediments. When the Scrum master is a techie he will be very efficient in conducting the scrum stand up meetings in the morning and resolving technical impediments for the team members to sign in for respective tasks. But still if the scrum master is none technical.. its team work.. get the techies to help you in all the aspects…

4. Sometimes I see many think that you don’t have to commit on a release date in scrum. No.. in real world it doesn’t happen like that. There is always a tentative date.. But what happens is that based on the changes to the PB, your time expansions or reductions become much more visible to the product owner. Therefore there will be lesser problems to convince on expanded time lines

5. How do we do the DB design , Architecture UI themes etc? Part by part for each delivery? No what best I have experienced is that have a pre sprint on those high level tasks which you need to perform for the whole project at once. But minimize them and have only the vital ones.

6. How do we use Scrum for research projects? – I think it’s the ideal. Very uncertain type of work.. Scrum works fine !

7. Do we still have to do reporting to the management? YeAAS – Recently I read an Article by Mike and he suggest to continue the same type of reporting as much as possible till Agile thinking mature in the organization.

8. Is Gantt charts needed.. For me the answer is “NO” but again Ive seen many agile gurus have mentioned that .. use it as a communication tool if really needed by someone.. But personally I don’t like Gantt charts..

9. Is MS Project needed for Scrum : NOOOOO

10. How about the WBS ? I say keep it as the component diagram for the project.. this has many advantages over disadvantages.

11. How long a waterfall team will take to convert to a scrum team: My experience is 2 days most the time.

12. Is planning Poker a must? Nope Nope.. But when you don’t play cards some team members start to play ;-) specially in SL context not all team members talk. Planning poker help to define your ideas and stand by it ., then there will be so much valuable points coming from the team about a particular user story. I find it helpful.

13. Do you only assign the weight to a task in the sprint? No for me number of hours at this point is also important.. the secret is not more than 16 hours per task.

14. Can you compare velocity of multiple teams to identify team performance? : NO because there is no base for that. Different team may assess weight to similar tasks differently.

15. How do you practice scrum in outsourced Projects? A million dollar question. But still possible.. there are many tools which may help with customer communication when it comes to product backlog and sprint backlog. The secret is ask the product backlog in advance.. so you can be well prepared..

16. Will the PO always write user stories?.. Hmm…….. :)Somebody has to do all the work sometimes…

17. One tip I would give is that when playing planning poker.. get the moderator to write notes about the requirements elaborated by the PO and the team. Recording the conversation is really a good idea.

Here I am.. This is me :-)

PM Network April Issue 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Magazines & Newspape project outsourcing project mangement

Speachless Monday

I will let him speak :-)

Initiating Scrum at a new customer and training the team .

Last week I had really a good opertunity. A customer located in Stavenger wanted to impliment SCRUM for their project management process. So I was just there to help them on that with a new project.

The customer didn’t have any matured project management methodologies, frameoworks or tools already in place. Therefore setting up the new process was much more easier.
When we arrived, they have already got the “Ideal place” for the scrum team. It was a very open spacious room with a round table , White board.. so everybody could sit there and dicuss ideas freely. The highlight was all the refreshments and foods (wont forget Cinnamon and honey muffins )and drinks and chocolotes.. wow I love this scrum team.
Ok How did I start?

I had an idea about the customer and the nature of business/Projects before I arrived.
1. First I explained them the difference between our normal traditional project management methodologies and scrum. As most the people i meet, some of this team members also thought Agile is Scrum. So I had to explain them Scrum is Agile and Agile is not scrum :) then again I made it very clear to them the difference between looking at software project management from the manufacturing angle instead of looking at the construction industry.

2. Once they had a good overview about the framework , I asked one of their team members to give an overview of the project which they have selected to manage using scrum as a Pilot Scrum project. The idea is to manage this project using scrum, get the Scrum culture introduced to the organisation , and then once the project is sucessful, to roleout the process to all the company projects.
(Another nice thing which I couldn’t mention about this scrum team is that they had 2 members from Stavenger and 2 Members from my SL team onsite .. so multi cultural team)

3. Then we started assigning roles.. Who is going to be a product owner , Scrum master and the team and their expertiese. We decided the software manager of the company as the product owner for this specific product as he has the ownership of the product and easy access to all the stakeholders.
4. The Teachlead of the team became the scrum master and my 2 guys and other developers were the scrum team.
5. So we started creating a product backlog. Before me arriving they have created one .. But it looked more like a task list to me. And it had 300 items.. So we started creating a product backlog to create a web application framework for the company .
6. Once we created the product backlog.. I trained them on how to play planning poker and weigh the product backlog. We were not prepared with a proper planning poker card set so we just created our own sets.
7. It was bit exausting excersise at first to get the team and the product owner in to Planning poker. But after 2 , 3 user stories there was really a good progress.
8. Then the product owner added the priority to each story. For this product owner everythign was 1st priority.. so there I am again.. Convincing :)
9. Then he mentioned at what points he needs releases.
10. We called it a day there as we all were exausted.. Specialy the product owner. :)
11. The next day .. we all met at 8 Am.. ( I had only 2 days allocated for this whole thing and I had to leave at 4 PM to the Airport to take a flight to Oslo back. So it was not easy..)
12. Ok the sprint planning meeting. The mangement had some concern ….do we have to spend this much of time for these planing sessions.?. My Answer was “Yes” Because in scrum, the time we spend for planning session is not just planning task. We ellaborate hell of a lot there when it comes to requirements and moderator can just document them as a base for requirement doc .
13. They wanted 5 day scprint first.. Quite strange but nice. Because the idea of the 1st sprint was to complete studying the exisitng framework and system and coming up with a new frame work design.
14. We selected the required user stories and then split them in to atomic level tasks.. The time was not right to play a planning poker game again to asign caleries for each task so the team disucsss and weigh the sprint ( Yes I don’t recommend this.. but some times we have to use shortcuts at trainings J )
15. Then the number of hours were also specified for the tasks. This was bit of a hard thing.
16. I explained them how they should start dailiy scrum meeting next day and thehow they should track caleries burned each day by each team member.
17. Then they asked me what tools to use, any scrum tools off the shelf, team system what? I said NO. because at this time what is important is the concept and how they use it to run the project. Not the tool. So I prepared some Excel templates for the product Backlog, Product Burn down velocity, Sprint back log, sprint burn down velocity , Impediment log and Sprint review template. So they have to work with XL first as it’s the most simplest way to do it.
18. It was time for me to depart.. they showed lot of confidence on the method.. it will take some time to establish as the main challenge of scrum is the mentality change and not anything else.
It was kinda sad to leave such a good team, but they can contact me at any time for any clarifications so there were no much risks.
Overall it was really nice 2 days and good workshop.

What is a dumb question..?

Ok first of all I don’t believe there are any dumb questions.. Its only dumb people. No questions are dumb. But people who don’t question are really dumb.
As a project Manager /Scrum master you need your team members to ask questions. You need your product owner /customer to ask questions.. you need your senior management and other stakeholders to ask you questions. If they don’t question and if they don’t ask questions freely , the payback you have will be too much for you to handle at the end of the project.
So how do you get people around you to question you ..? Its very simple... Create that environment around the project. Make it a project culture.. Every team member should be able to question about each other and about the product.. and about the requirements.
To my surprise I have come across with many project managers who create a shield to prevent others questioning about the project by being defensive for questions. This is really a bad syndrome. They have no idea how others around them could really help them to get them on line. Early awareness about issues to the management and to the customer really help to find solutions before its too late.
I still cant understand why a project manger cannot show his or her application design to a business manager.. and questions such as .. by looking at from the outside , do you think that this is user friendly enough ? Do you see any risks in this schedule which I have not seen so far.. its really important for a project managers to create this situation in any project. We all know scrum facilitate this situation. But unfortunately all the projects under the sun are not proper scrum projects. So no matter what the methodologies you use or technologies you use, it’s totally up to you to create enough transparency about your projects to encourage questions.

Project Management in global economy crisis situation..

If you are a software company, depending on outsourced projects from western; USA, Europe, What may come along your way now ?How you should analyze the risk and get prepared to face the worst and still to deliver your projects as planned? Something to think about J
After hearing many things happening in the industry what I can see coming along our way are as follows;

1. Reducing resources of your projects which are in execution. This can happen if you are in to fixed price deals – Customer may ask you to reduce the number of heads in the project. Even internally, due to employee recession and recruitment freeze there will be corporate decisions to reduce the number of resources of your projects.
2. Requests for reducing the cycle time of the project- You may get requests to cut down on processes and documentation. You may get this request very often. A project which you spent 10 months to develop may have to be delivered within 6 months by cutting corners from your lengthy documentation and processes.
3. Even your teams may be over loaded with resources. – If you are in accompany where they have lost few projects due to the situation and still keeping the resources in house due to many reasons, your projects may get overloaded unless they get together and develop a specific product to the market.
4. You may have hear the news all of sudden “ we need to stop this project now because the customer or the investor stopped funding this project” What would be your position as the project Manager?
5. Some of your team members may not in focus and May not in their peak of productivity as they are so concerned about their lost hopes of increments, bonus, and even the stability of the company and their jobs.
6. Quality process may dropped drastically due to all these reasons
7. Sometimes only must have features will be requested.. If you are practicing scrum the product owner may satisfy with the project after first few sprints which delivers his core functionalities
8. You may have to cut down your project budgets dramatically, your team allowances, entertainments, team building activities will be a question mark.

Still you are a lucky PM ? why ? you still have a project to manage with all these problems and test your real PM skills of working under tremendous pressure.. .
As a PM nothing worst than not having any projects in your company to manage J

Lets discuss this further in a future post..