A quick look at the Top 3 global project management trends

1. A project’s success criteria is being determined by ROI and ROCE rather than the traditional three-factor approach of Time, Cost and Scope.
2. Projects are getting executed through distributed teams who collaborate with each other over cloud-based platforms, and perform concurrent development.
3. Project planning is getting decentralized and adapting best practices from all methods of project management (traditional, agile) rather than just one method.

The pandemic is acting like a catalyst, and speeding up the adoption of distributed teams working from remote locations and collaborating with each other over cloud-based platforms performing concurrent development. Based on the industry reports, it seems likely that going forward, this is probably how we will work hereafter. The traditional command and control methods are giving way to principle-based management, and driving collaboration, trust, openness, and transparency, which in turn is paving the way for the adoption of Agile Project Management (APM) into Engineering projects.

Why Agile

Of all the available agile frameworks, the SCRUM framework is the most popular because of its simplicity and adaptability to other engineering domains, going beyond the software development process for which it was originally intended.

The SCRUM framework comprises of a set of activities or ‘ceremonies’ like;

• Sprint-planning meeting
• Sprinting
• Daily scrum meeting
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective

These ceremonies collectively create the environment required for remote team members to self-organize and collaborate, in order to deliver high quality deliverables with predictability and consistency.

For Engineering teams who are new to Scrum, here is a quick translation of the above ceremonies into project  stages:

• Preparation
• Planning (Sprint planning)
• Execution (Sprinting)
• Monitoring & Control (Daily scrum meeting, Sprint review)
• Closing (Sprint retrospective)

Preparation

During the preparation phase, the project manager along with his team will:

1. Define the Engineering Work Packages (EWP)
2. Provide weightages to the EWPs based on the effort involved to complete them
3. Prioritize the EWPs based on their urgency and importance
4. Create a project roadmap comprising of major milestones, at 30 day intervals
5. Distribute the EWPs across the milestones

 

Planning (Sprint planning)

During the planning meeting, the project manager along with the team will discuss and agree on the EWPs they will be delivering within the next 30 days. The main activities performed during the planning meeting are:

1. Refine estimates the EWPs scheduled within the sprint by allocating points based on the amount of work involved
2. Decompose the EWPs into deliverables
3. Identify the activities with process flow for different deliverable types
4. Allocate Budgets
5. Define weightages for progress measurement for each activity
6. Define schedules for key activities
7. Identify resource requirements based on roles
8. Commit on deliverables and their schedule (Sprint Goals)

Execution (Sprinting)

During execution the main activities performed are:

1. The team performs the work based on the look ahead plan
2. Each team member performs their tasks based on the task list
3. Actual efforts are captured
4. The team works together collaboratively to achieve the goals
5. Comments for resolution are identified with responsibilities

Monitoring & Controlling

Scrum keeps everything visible to every stakeholder associated with the project, during every phase of the project. This is accomplished with:

1. Real time reporting of status and progress (transparency)
2. Daily meetings (daily scrum)
3. Burn down charts
4. Earned value charts
5. Variance analysis
6. Reforecasting based on the catch-up plan
7. Milestone reviews (Sprint reviews)

Closing

Upon completion of the milestone date (Sprint), retrospective meetings are conducted with the help of audit trails, and the learnings are incorporated into the subsequent sprint planning leading to the next sprint milestone. Reforecasting of the balance milestones and the associated EWPs are done.

Conclusion

As project teams across the world embrace remote working, it is clear that the Scrum framework provides an easy-to-understand and scalable method for working effectively based on trust, transparency, openness and collaboration.

Engineering teams who adopted Scrum to deliver their projects have reported the following benefits:

• Increased communication
• Better transparency
• Clarity of tasks to be performed
• Better inter-team relationship
• Faster collaborative problem-solving
• Unified ways of working
• Increased accountability of tasks

The best approach for scrum adoption would be a bottom up approach.  Implement it in one project, or in a significant part of one project, and then scale it up.