Project Management

I’m at the Agile Business Conference today and tomorrow, presenting the NPWD Case Study. I will be blogging on interesting stuff from other presentations.

Interestingly I spent most of today chatting rather than watching presentations. However I did catch Rob Thomsett’s highly entertaining and informative presentation on implementing agile. One of the interesting little snippets he gave are the “sliders” below.

They can be used as key indicators to calibrate how people feel about a project and how it should / is being run.

One of the other re-current themes is the thorny issue of “collaborative procurement” which I have blogged on before.  One of the key challenges in implementing agile methods is the fact that all of them require effective collaboration to be successful.  This is relatively easy to achieve inside an organisation (yes, really if there is a will to) the problem comes in when the organisation brings in external third parties e.g. software developers.  At this point company rules about procurement cut in and these rules are nearly always confrontational and assume a lack of trust; not a good start to any collaboration.

After blogging on the topic of virtual teams (below), I noticed this post on the topic on Gantthead.com.  I’ve also PDFed it so you can download it here (Part time teams; full time projects)

I’m not sure I agree with everything he says, but it is a useful contribution to the topic.

All of Kubernetes’ work involves virtual teams and these are virtual both in the organisational sense i.e. drawn from across the clients’ operation and in the physical sense i.e. in many locations. This means that, by default, we have gained a lot of experience in managing projects “remotely”.

A couple of recent experiences have shown us how much we have learnt without actually realising it!  Without going into details this includes:-

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I commented about the project management problems for Network Rail at Christmas. It will be very interesting to see if they do any better in delivering on time over Easter as there is a significant amount of the network out of action.

Update 25th March

Still making headlines….. “Engineering overrun causes rail travel delays”

Update 28th March 

Jeff Randall makes some useful points in the Telegraph today

Updated 13th Feb

The presentations this morning convinced me that test driven development is the way to go at an engineering level.  Not only does it provide a way of flushing out the  detailed requirements, it minimises the risks of defects in the final product.  The only challenge is that to do it properly needs automated test tools and they seem to have finally matured with opensource products like Fitnesse competing with commercial alternatives.  It was really quite uplifting.

Updated eve 12th Feb from the conference

Interesting day in a number of ways, not least of which was UNICOM’s laptop deciding to hibernate about 2/3rds of the way through Steve and I’s session. Hopefully we managed to cope OK even though I filled the gap with part of my standard rant about risk and procurement (it will appear here at some point soon, really).

The final presentation is here UNICOM NPWD Final Presentation

The best quote was from Chris Ambler Head of QA for Electronic Arts when referring to testing a 1st person shooter game. He was taken to task for not testing all the scenarios in a game after an obscure one crashed the server; his comment “How can you completely test something that uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to fight back”. The important point is that in complex systems (all systems in reality) not every scenario can be tested.

I had a couple of very interesting conversations at evening drinks. One was with Peter Measey about the difference between a project and a programme. He insisted that a a programme was a group of connected projects that deliver business benefits; effectively a “change programme” that does not have a proscribed end. My position was that, in the agile world, the whole focus of projects is on business benefit and change and shouldn’t a change programme have measurable end in the same way as projects? If you accept this then surely a programme is the “macro-project” that all the other projects are “workstreams” from. More to come here as well I think.

The other conversation was about the difference between project management and project facilitation which I need more time to digest.

Monday 11th February

I am presenting a case study of the National Packaging Waste Database project with Steve Watkins of the Environment Agency tomorrow at this UNICOM conference. Wish me luck!

I’ll try and blog from there as well as there are some other interesting looking presentations.