Business finance - management weekly assignment

WeeklyAssignment.docx

Assignment:

Week 1:

You are project manager for a project to develop a banking app for one of your customers. You want to include metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure project progress and earned value in your project plan.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

· What are the best metrics to measure business value in this situation?

· Develop 1 KPI for this banking app scenario. What led you to choose this metric?

task?

Answer:

Week 2:

Continuous improvement is an integral part of all agile methodologies. You can think of it as holding a “lessons learned” review at each step of the project, rather than waiting for project completion.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

· Describe your top 3 key continuous improvement components. Why do you consider these the most important components?

· Share an example from your research or personal experience where you have seen these key components used. Describe how they contributed toward continuous improvement.

Answer:

Week 3:

The “Adaptation” section (which includes the "Levels of Planning," "Adaptation," and "Agile Sizing and Estimation" subsections) on p. 417 of “Appendix A: Next Steps” of PMI-ACP® Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner Exam Study Guide reviews several considerations for adaptive planning. – See highlighted below for the references:

Adaptation

Practicing agility allows the team to adapt to changing environments.

Adapt the cadence and the planning process based on results of periodic retrospectives about characteristics and/or the size/complexity/criticality of the project deliverables in order to maximize the value.

Inspect and adapt the project plan to reflect changes in requirements, schedule, and budget and to reflect shifting priorities based on team learning, delivery experience, stakeholder feedback, and defects in order to maximize business value delivered.

Review and apply these recommendations to the following scenario: You are a project manager for a new video streaming service. Your video streaming service is competing with other prominent and established video streaming services, such as Netflix® and Hulu®. Your project goal is to provide quality programming at a competitive price.

Agile Sizing and Estimation

Planning is different in an Agile project as compared to a Waterfall preplanned project, therefore estimation and sizing of work needs to be adaptable and relevant to the work itself.Size items by using progressive elaboration techniques in order to determine likely project size independent of team velocity and external variables

.Adjust capacity by incorporating maintenance and operations demands and other factors in order to create or update the range estimate.

Create initial scope, schedule, and cost range estimates that reflect current high-level understanding of the effort necessary to deliver the project in order to develop a starting point for managing the project.

Refine scope, schedule, and cost range estimates that reflect the latest understanding of the effort necessary to deliver the project in order to manage the project.

Continuously use data from changes in resource capacity, project size, and velocity metrics in order to evaluate the estimate to complete or ETC.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

· Describe 3 items that should be tracked and considered to measure earned value and discuss how that value is determined.

· List 3 KPIs that should be tracked and indicate what good and poor values are for each KPI.

Answer:

Week 4:

One of the aspects of adaptive planning is communicating project changes and issues to the stakeholders in terms of budget, planned value (PV), and earned value (EV).

Identify a project you have worked on or one you may have read about in the readings or your research.

Using the project you identified, respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

· Was the project you identified run in a traditional or agile methodology?

· If traditional, would it have benefited from applying agile techniques? How?

· If it was managed using agile, were PV and EV used in monitoring and communicating the status?

· Based on your newfound knowledge of agile management techniques, what would you have done differently to improve project performance for the identified project?

If this project was unsuccessful, how would the use of adaptive planning strategies have improved the project performance and value?

Answer:

Week 5:

You are in charge of a project for a personal electronic device, such as a smartphone. Your design team is based in the United States, and your manufacturing team is based in China. Your project is going through multiple design updates, and it is essential to keep everyone on the team updated about the same information.

Review the potential issues for distributed teams in Ch. 7, “Effective Team Performance on Agile Projects,” on pp. 287–296 of PMI-ACP® Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner Exam Study Guide.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

· Describe how you would identify and address 2 of the Code of Ethics “offenders.”

· Describe how you would use 2 of the suggested communication and coaching techniques to improve team collaboration.

·

Answer:

Week 6:

Review the Agile (B): Project Management Mind-set Case Study .

For this discussion, consider Jane, the project manager from the Agile (B): Project Management Mind-set Case Study and the following details: Imagine that Jane is now using agile management techniques, as opposed to her traditional hands-on project management style. Jane has encountered issues that will make the project fail to meet its cost and schedule targets. She has been holding regular meetings with project stakeholders. These stakeholders include project team leaders that have been empowered to manage their portions of the project, senior management within Jane’s company, and the end customer for the project.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

· Based on this week’s readings, how should Jane’s project shortfall be communicated to the stakeholders and when?

· What would you have done differently if you were in Jane's situation?

Answer:

AgileBProjectManagementMind-set.pdf

Agile (B): Project Management Mind-set Case Study

Agile (B): Project Management Mind-set Jane had been a project manager for more than 15 years. All of her projects were executed using traditional project management practices. But now she was expected to manage projects using an agile approach rather than the traditional project management approach she was accustomed to. She was beginning to have reservations as to whether she could change how she worked as a project manager. This could have a serious impact on her career.

THE TRIPLE CONSTRAINTS Jane believed that clear scope definition, sometimes on a microscopic level, had to be fully understood before a project could officially kick off. Sometimes as much as 30–35 percent of the project’s labor dollars would be spent in scope definition and planning the project. Jane deemed the exorbitant amount of money spent planning the project a necessity to minimize downstream scope changes that could alter the cost and schedule baselines.

Senior management was adamant that all of the scope had to be completed. This meant that, even though senior management had established a target budget and scheduled end date, the project manager could change the time and cost targets based on the detailed scope definition. Time and cost had flexibility in order to meet the scope requirements.

With agile project management, Jane would have to work differently. Senior management was now establishing a budget and a scheduled completion date, neither of which were allowed to change, and management was now asking Jane how much scope she could deliver within the fixed budget and date.

PLANNING AND SCOPE CHANGES Jane was accustomed to planning the entire project in detail. When scope changes were deemed necessary, senior management would more often than not allow the schedule to be extended and let the budget increase. This would now change.

Planning was now just high-level planning at the beginning of the project. The detailed planning was iterative and incremental on a stage-by- stage basis. At the end of each stage, detailed planning just for the next stage would begin. This made it quite clear to Jane that the expected outcome of the project would be an evolving solution.

COMMAND AND CONTROL Over Jane’s 15-year career, as she became more knowledgeable in project management, she became more of a doer than a pure manager. She would actively participate in the planning process and provide constant direction to her team. On some projects, she would perform all of the planning by herself.

With agile project management, Jane would participate in just the high-level planning, and the details would be provided by the team. This meant that Jane no longer had complete command and control and had to work with teams that were empowered to make day-to-day decisions to find the solution needed at the end of each stage. This also impacted project staffing; Jane needed to staff her projects with employees whose functional managers felt they could work well in an empowered environment.

Jane’s primary role now would be working closely with the business manager and the client to validate that the solution was evolving. As project manager, Jane would get actively involved with the team only when exceptions happened that could require scope changes resulting in changes to the constraints.

RISK MANAGEMENT With traditional project management that was reasonably predictable, risk management focused heavily on meeting the triple constraints of time, cost, and scope. But with agile project management, where the budget and schedule were fixed, the most critical risk was the creation of business value. However, since

Agile (B): Project Management Mind-set Case Study Page 2 of 3

the work was being done iteratively and incrementally, business value was also measured iteratively and incrementally, thus lowering some of the risk on business value.

QUESTIONS 1. How easy would it be for Jane to use an agile project management approach from this point

forth? 2. If Jane could change, how long would it take? 3. Are there some projects where Jane would still be required to use traditional project

management? 4. Empowerment of teams is always an issue. How does Jane know whether the team can be

trusted with empowerment?

Agile (B): Project Management Mind-set Case Study Page 3 of 3

References

Kerzner. H. (2017). Project Management Case Studies, 5th ed. Wiley and Sons.

THE TRIPLE CONSTRAINTS
PLANNING AND SCOPE CHANGES
COMMAND AND CONTROL
RISK MANAGEMENT