The Missing Pieces For A Winning Agile Project (Episode 2)
The experience shared below was based on the real cases in project management of the experts. Going through the stories brings you valuable insights and if this helped, leaving comments will make us know how to improve the content!
Amr Kassem:
About the interviewee: Amr is a professional IT project manager, who started out as a developer (ITWorx INC.), moving on the Business Analysis area (in SunLife Financial and Underwriters Laborities), and finally working in the Project Management area of the industry.
From what I’ve seen, Communication Gaps tend to be the area where most projects get caught.
This is especially true for smaller companies, where processes have not been ironed out yet, and a lot of decisions are made in ‘hallway conversations’. 2 stakeholders bump into each other walking in and out of meetings and, voila, they decide to have an impromptu meeting.
The problem is usually not what is decided in this meeting, but how it’s communicated afterwards.
In most cases I’ve seen, the impromptu meeting is followed up by another private conversation where one of the stakeholders talks to 1 or 2 other team members (usually their most trusted, or favorite) and that’s where the chain ends.
Suddenly, a code build gets deployed that has changes that catches everyone on the team by surprise, except for the select few who were lucky enough to be ‘in’ on the communication loop.
What I did
To solve this problem, I’ve resorted to increasing the team’s communication points. Allowing them to spend more time together, will reduce the chance of these hallway conversations having a severe impact, because they’ve mostly had a chance to talk about their ideas already, in the meeting.
Now, these meetings don’t necessarily have to be 3-hour meetings every other day. They just need to touch base 1–2 times a week, maybe for 15 mins.
Couple this with a few probing questions in the meeting, this is enough to uncover any ideas stakeholders may have, that would put a dent in the project’s schedule.
Ali Adib
About the interviewee: Ali has been a project manager for more than 10 years, for organizations such as Building Blocks Inc. and IGWD Co. He is currently a PM and a Consultant with leadership experience. (Visit Ali LinkedIn Here).
I would love for my team to understand the scope and the product/service we are working on better.
Often scope can be overlooked and teams and management tend to jump into deciding the budget, timeline, quality, risk, tasks, WBS, and so on, before spending enough time to review and fully understand what is it we are trying to accomplish.
That’s why I like Agile methodologies.
Agile gives you many opportunities for meeting, discussing and reflecting on project execution. It also provides more flexibility around the scope and other aspects of the project.
On the other hand, Agile can get expensive and scope creep and gold plating happen. It is important for IT project managers to keep an eye out for those things.
My Practice
In one of my own project management experiences, we were planning to tackle some data issues across our platforms. We would meet regularly to discuss “what to do” and develop sprints.
However, in hindsight, something was missing.
Not everyone was on the same page about “why” we are going to do “what” we agreed on and task list.
What we were going to achieve as part of the project vision and scope was not fully understood by the team.
It took me several meeting to understand that despite easy access to project documents and vision, not everyone is thoroughly reading and understanding them.
If I had to go back to help improve the situation, I would hold a meeting specifically to go over basic project documents in person, as opposed to point everyone to them and ask them to “read and ask any questions they may have”.
If our team understood the scope deeper and “why” we are doing “what” we were doing, every step of the project would move forward by the team more effectively. 😃
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