Agile project management - for whom and why?

• the Product Owner,
• the Development Team and
• the Scrum Master

The Product Owner is your customer or represents your customer. He makes sure that the customer's interests are implemented in the project.

The Development Team works independently and autonomously on the implementation of the customer's wishes.

The Scrum Master acts as a coach, who ensures that the team can work as smoothly as possible.

Agile project management: Scrum project management is based on four principles

• Individuals and interactions are more important than processes and
             project management tools
• A functioning end result (e.g. software) is more important than detailed
            documentation
• The active cooperation with the customer is more important than
             contractual fixations
• Meaningful changes to the project objective are more important than
             stubbornly following the original plan

What other agile methods for agile project management exist?

Scrum is currently the most popular method for agile project management.

But there are many more agile techniques like Kanban, Extreme Programming, MVP, Feature Driven Development, Test Driven Development or Crystal Clear, with which you can manage agile projects.

The term "agile project management" is becoming more and more a generic term for the approach, which differs significantly from the classic waterfall method.

Kanban

Developed in the 1950s, Kanban (Japanese for "signal card") originally comes from the production control system of Toyota.

The aim is to efficiently control each manufacturing or production stage and to optimize the material flow. When transferred to IT, Kanban elements from Lean Production, Lean Development and the Theory of Constraints were added. The result is a separate agile project management system in which the number of parallel tasks is limited, thus achieving shorter throughput times.
This enables you to avoid bottlenecks for agile project management, as they become quickly visible.

The following principles help you to control your projects for agile project management with IT-Kanban:

• Visualisation of all stations of the workflow on a Kanban board
             The individual tasks, for example noted on a file card, can be moved
             quickly and easily from left to right through the  individual stages of the
             value chain.

• Limitation of work (Work in Progress)
             For agile project management, you can define a maximum number of
             tasks that can be processed simultaneously per station.

• Control and analysis of the workflow
             You can easily improve your work process by analyzing measurements s
             such as queue length or through put time  (from station to station or
             total throughput time).

• Formulation of rules for the process
             You can define for agile project management what is meant by the term
             "ready" or in which order, i.e. according to which priority, the task cards
              should be taken.

• Continuous improvement and promotion of leadership
             You can encourage your employees to submit concrete suggestions for
             improvement. The suggestions will then be seriously discussed at all
             organizational levels and, if appropriate, implemented.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a user-oriented method for solving problems and developing new ideas. The team usually consists of members from different disciplines. They take the user's perspective and focus on the user's wishes and requirements.

You can divide the process of Design Thinking into six steps for agile project management:

• Understanding: The client explains the task to your team.

• Observe: Your team members write down the task.

• Synthesis: Your team collects its notes and comes to a common
              understanding of the task.

• Finding ideas: The team collects possible solutions for the tasks and
             then selects the best one.

• Prototyping: Your team will then implement the best solution as a
             prototype.

• Test of the created prototype: You can then run tests and, if necessary,
             further optimize the product.

DevOps

The DevOps model is characterized by high IT and software relevance. DevOps is an artificial word made up of the terms development and (IT) operations.

The purpose of the model is to achieve more effective and efficient cooperation between the areas of development (Dev), IT operations (Ops) and quality assurance (QA). DevOps thus refers to the cross-departmental, company-wide cooperation of managers, developers, testers and administrators with the involvement of the customer. All those involved pull together and have the common goal in mind: the provision of high-quality software.

With DevOps you can develop software for agile project management faster and with better quality. It also improves the collaboration of your teams.

• high flexibility,
• rapid implementation,
• low planning effort,
• easy management and administration,
• strong adaptability,
• high level of personal responsibility

These advantages give you a significant competitive edge.

In agile project management, however, you should pay attention to company-wide project and resource management, because the agile approach requires:

• A high communication effort
             Agile methods work very well when only one department is involved
             and there is little or no dependence on the outcome. However, agile
             development projects are often part of larger customer projects. In this
             case, it is very important that you attach great importance to internal
             communication and complete coordination between the departments.

• Good capacity planning
             Agile approaches do not make the work less. That's why you always
             have to plan your capacities in the project precisely.

• Tools for agile project management
             Agile project management is usually implemented in our own special
             software solutions. If these are not integrated into the company-wide
             project management software, considerable information deficits can
             arise in these enterprise solutions, which can have a negative impact
             especially when simulating future scenarios in the project portfolio.
             Therefore you should always pay attention to the selection of suitable
             project management tools. 
• A high degree of personal responsibility
             Employees must be able to act independently in agile teams. For you,
             this means that when selecting the right team members, you should not
             only focus on professional competence. You should also be prepared to
             act on your own responsibility.
• Low predictability of the final project outcome
             The quick adaptability of the goals and the approach also means that
              the entire project can be redefined at any time.
• No or little documentation on the solution found
             Since solutions are often found through brainstorming, it is very difficult
             to document them properly.
• No resilient multi-project management
             Since agility does not allow for comprehensive multi-project
             management hardly feasible.
  
  

Tips for introducing agile methods for agile project management

The introduction of agile project management is a challenge, but not witchcraft. It is important that you start small and as simple as possible:

• Choose a team that wants to work agile.
• Choose a small project that is as clearly defined as possible.
• Make sure you define your goals precisely.
• Decide which agile project management method you want to use.
• Make sure that your team understands the method.
• Find out whether team members need to be trained.

If it is your first agile project, it would be important to record all successes and failures after completion in order to learn from them. Be sure to document what worked well, where you still have room for improvement or where you should use hybrid project management

Then optimize your agile project management and start your next project!

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