Business Finance - Management QSO 435 Homeworks ( week 6)

You also must respond to your classmates. In your response posts: • Reply to at least two classmates outside of your own initial post thread. • Advance the discussion by sharing your perspective and explaining why you agree or disagree with your classmates’ logic.

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Batrece Jenkins

My case study is the Valpak case. They already have in place different methodologies based on the project. They use a mixture of Scrum, Kanban, and Waterfall. They use different styles depending on the project size. With Scrum, they are able to develop IT projects with an emphasis on stakeholder satisfaction. Their IT department builds and supports technology for a wide range of stakeholders and customers. This is why Scrum is a good choice for their company. Scrum works in short sprints or iterations and this allows them to make changes quickly based on feedback of the team and the stakeholder. Using these short sprints, Valpak could release software every two weeks which allows them to respond to the quickly changing digital marketplace that their stakeholders and consumers expect.

Their "overall enterprise-level approach is based on the Scaled Agile Framework."(Cobb, 2015) This method combines Agile software development with lean product development. This consists of three primary layers which were the portfolio layer, program layer, and team layer. This also combined Scrum and Kanban. They used Scrum for exploratory development and Kanban for the "run the business" kinds of development. (Cobb, 2015) Valpak understands the need to choose the correct methodology based on the project.

I believe that Valpak are using the best choices for their business needs. Selecting SAfe allows them to have the flexibility to make quick changes and adapt to any needs of the consumer or the stakeholder in small batches instead of waiting until the end of a long project like with Waterfall. The Kanban method allows for the team to have visibility with the process and where they are along the way. These would be the methods I would choose as well.

Sources:

Cobb, C. G. (2015). The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile: Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach. Wiley Professional Development (P&T). https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781118991763

Piikkila, J. (2022). What is SAFe? Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale/what-is-safe

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Travis Grimm

Good day everyone,

Sorry for the late post, I thought I hit submit last night. However, as we see, I did not. I have been studying Harvard Pilgram Health Care (HPHC) for my case study. When I first started this week, I was trying to apply a different method to this case study. Originally, I was thinking about applying plan driven development. This method still focused on schedules, work completion, and identified risks. After reading some other peers discussion post. I think I made the wrong decision.

HPHC was rebuilding their entire infrastructure which included software and hardware. They developed an agile approach which focused on iterative and hybrid Scrum methodology. I think this was the right choice because of couple reasons. The first reason is around them understanding the size of the project. This was a strong business which was going to focus on an IT business. There were different vendors/customers who were involved. This was going to be over 200 different parts of this project. They focused on having a system which was flexible and could adapt well to changes (cobb 2015).

As with every project, there are going to be downfalls. However, I think their biggest downfall was changing how they currently did project work. They were starting with a huge project, and they found some learning curves using the new system. I think with them understanding those challenges and not reverting back to the old system was a great accomplishment. Maybe they could have ramped up the training however, I am not sure they would have helped. People are hard to change once they get stuck in their "own" way (cobb 2015).

Cobb, C. G. (2015). The Project Manager’s Guide to Mastering Agile: Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach. John Wiley & Sons.