Project Management III Q & A

BBA 3626, Project Management Overview 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit III Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

3. Identify scope, quality, responsibility, activity sequence, and schedule of a project.

Reading Assignment Chapter 3: Organizational Capability: Structure, Culture, and Roles, pp. 52-75, and 79-80 Chapter 6: Scope Planning, pp. 144-166, and 169 Chapter 7: Scheduling Projects, pp. 170-200, and 205-206

Unit Lesson Unit III summary is going to discuss agile project management in relation to the traditional approach. Agile project management has been used for several projects for the Department of Defense. Traditional project management consists of a phased, sequential, non-iterative, and plan-driven approach based mainly on the standards of the Project Management Institute (PMI). Agile project management is an “approach used to reduce product development time while minimizing risk through continuous interaction between the customer and small self-organized teams that produce increments of working product features in short iterations while rapidly adapting to changes in requirements” (Gido & Clements, 2015, p. 183). Agile project management can be mapped to traditional project management which is outlined in “How a traditional project manager transforms to scrum” by Sutherland and Ahmad, (2011). If the scope is difficult to define and many changes are expected, the agile project management model is the preferred choice. At the beginning of an agile project, overall planning is at a high level and only the work that is to be performed soon or first is to be laid out. This is a segmented model which operates in iterations. The next part of the project is then planned in detail. The iterations are called sprints. These sprints are assigned a set amount of time, such as two or four weeks. The project team, as a group, agrees to deliver something at the end of each sprint. “Each iteration has initial planning, a brief daily meeting, a demonstration of the value at the end of the iteration, and a retrospective meeting at the end to learn and apply the learnings to the next iteration” (Kloppenborg, 2015, p. 64). Scrum is one of the most popular methods for implementing agile project management. Some of the roles involved in the agile project management model include: product owner, development team, and the scrum master. The scrum master is the facilitator for the process (Gido & Clements, 2015). Let’s discuss some of the roles of the participants involved with the scrum process. First, we have a product owner, who is also called a customer representative. His or her job is to define customer and product requirements and features. This is done to ensure that the development team delivers an end product with the features defined. User stories are used sometimes for product features, which help paint the picture of what is wanted. This story could include changes to existing products or features wanted in a new product. Prioritization is also done by the product owner for requirements based on their value and dependent relationships. A product backlog is then created, which is actually an ordered list of the requirement features “from which the specific sets of items will be selected and released to the development team to produce and to demonstrate at the end of a fixed timeframe” (Gido & Clements, 2015, p. 183). The set of features are called releases just like with software updates. The next role to be discussed is the development team who delivers, develops, and demonstrates the working product increments for the specific product features or requirements for this timeframe. This timeframe is called a sprint. A sprint is also called an iteration; these two terms are interchangeable. As mentioned above,

UNIT III STUDY GUIDE

Project Management Principles

BBA 3626, Project Management Overview 2

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

sprints can be two or four weeks long. The development team consists of all levels of expertise to produce the deliverables. The teams are usually small, with no more than eight people. This team structure allows for good collaboration and a high level of communication. Face-to-face communication is emphasized with an open office environment so people can interact freely with one another. No leaders exist in this environment. Work tasks are based on the team members’ expertise (Gido & Clements, 2015). The scrum master’s primary job is:

to take actions to remove or reduce any obstacles, barriers, or constraints that are impeding progress of the development team toward accomplishing their work tasks and that may negatively impact the successful production and demonstration of a deliverable working product increment by the end of the sprint time. (Gido & Clements, 2015, p. 184).

Sprint cycles are fixed and uncompleted tasks are added back to the product backlog list to be completed during another sprint cycle. Scrum master does not equal project manager. The project manager manages his or her team, but the scrum master is just a facilitator. The team under the agile model is self-directed and self- organized (Gido & Clements, 2015). One of the goals of agile project management is to reduce the development time, while simultaneously communicating with the customer and self- organized teams. This approach is effective for projects that have difficult requirements to nail down and that have changing requirements. Short term planning is emphasized through this approach. Traditional project management consists of a phased, sequential, non-iterative, and plan-driven approach based mainly on the standards of the Project Management Institute (PMI). The waterfall method is one of the traditional approaches to project management and scrum is an alternative to this approach. Getting quicker feedback is an advantage of the scrum process. Collaboration is another benefit of scrum. The waterfall approach starts with the requirements analysis followed by the design, followed by the code, followed by integration, followed by testing, and finally deployment. A perfect understanding of the project is used with the waterfall method. This is why difficult projects, in relation to scope and requirements development, need a different approach such as scrum. Each approach has its own benefits as discussed in this summary (Gido & Clements, 2015).

References Gido, J., & Clements, J. (2015). Successful project management (6th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage. Kloppenborg, T. J. (2015). Contemporary project management (3rd ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning. Sutherland, J., & Ahmad, N. (2011). How a traditional project manager transforms to scrum. Retrieved from

www.agilealliance.org/files/session- pdfs/presentationhowatraditionalprojectmanagertransformstoscrum_final.pdf