Agile-led transformation - Integrating people, process and technology

Introduction

This blog explains about how agile led transformation can help in integrating people, process and technology in organization. These play significant role in transformation and its very important that organizations should maintain proper balance in people, process and technology.

About Agile

Agile is more than process ,framework  or methodology to organizations. Its passage to getting in to new era of delivery and execution from old traditional way. Agile helps teams to deliver result faster compared to older ways of execution. The big differentiator with Agile compared to other methodologies resides in its four values defined in AGILE manifesto.

·         Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools.

·         Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation.

·         Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation

·         Responding to Change Over Following a Plan.

With above values agile teams can deliver results faster with significant quality and predictability. In agile teams are cross functional, collaborative and self-organizing. Focus is given to responsibility  rather than roles. Agile helps organizations to execute projects with more transparent ways. In Agile projects, all stakeholders are closely engaged and able to see the team’s progress  throughout execution. The close engagement of stakeholder allows them to have more clarity of the project schedule, budget, resources allocation and utilization. This helps them to predict the output of the project in very early stages of the project.

Agile allows the change during the project execution and this is one of the key advantage to customers. In previous older methods this was one of the key blocker. Customers are allowed to prioritize the development tasks as per their current needs and add additional important tasks which were missed in initial stages.

Agile Transformation

Current organizations structure is more rigid and making it difficult to successfully implement agile with its full potential. The three pillars, people, process and technology are important factors for organization change. Transforming these pillars to agility can allow organizations to transform them from old traditional way to Agile led transformation.

Now a days all organizations are heavily investing for Agile transformation. Before moving to agility, it’s very important for any organization to understand the key strengths of their business and how agile can help in improving it. Agile is better suited for IT and its related businesses. It’s hard to suit the Agile for construction industries where things need to be executed in sequence and hardly changes are accepted in execution.

                                     The three important pillars of the organization for Agile transformation

 A true Agile transformation can be completed, when you integrate the, people, process and technology pillars. The integrated pillars will be more effective and result oriented and you will be able to create the knowledge enabled organization.

Agile is suitable for IT industries but it’s equally important to implement it in appropriate way to be successful. The three pillars discussed above plays vital role in the transformation and if those transferred without any pause or halt with maintaining the balance then its possible to transform organisation to Agile

Peoples

People are important asset of the organization and its equally important to have right people in the organization. To bring the agile culture in organization people plays very essential role. It’s important for organization to handle people very delicate way to bring change. It’s very easy to kick out peoples but it takes several years to bring right peoples in organization.

 Organizations need to work on the activities to create positive attitude in peoples mind. It’s essential that people should have right skill and confidence to use those to drive  organization in right direction. Organization need to create trustable environment among peoples and similar thought process to implement agile in effective way.

                                  Peoples in organization with positive attitude and similar mindset

These organizations promote and sustain an environment where people share what they think others need to know because there is high trust and a partnering mindset.  Leadership demands collaboration and measures performance by it.

Below are few important guidelines that will help to work on people pillar to transform the  organization to agility.

1.       Enable people and create leadership strategies

2.       Allow environment in the organization for change

3.       Enable effective communication and collaboration between people

4.       Focus on creating positive attitude with similar mindset

Process

Every organization run with certain processes and that helps them to achieve their goal in systematic way. Its not easy to execute the operations in organization without help of processes. Process play principal role in smooth executions of operations.

Organizations are adopting various processes with its related standards and training their people to follow the process in their day to day operations. The continuous improvement of the process is very important and improved process needs to be adopted in operation without any delay.

Any organization’s prime focus is to keep their customer happy and satisfactory and it can be achieved by providing expected quality result on time. To deliver the quality results on time it necessary to follow standard result oriented processes.  

 Some important guidelines for process pillar.

1.       Prepare positive attitude people and make them ready to adopt change

2.       Both technology and peoples must be flexible to accept the process and change in process

3.       Process must be in continuous improvement mode in order map current need of organization

Technology

Technology is essential for organization to drive the successful business and in IT business its one of the core part. Organizations are regularly updating their skill set as per customers requirement to deliver the expected output.

Organizations should always focus on people and their collective knowledge are secure, visible and easily accessible. There should be common knowledge base pool where people can upload the knowledgeable information and can easily download. Automation and digitization of process helps lot in day to day operations and that makes all tasks straight and easy. The industry standard practices must need to be followed to bring the quality output. 

The guidelines to work on technology pillar are as below.

1.       Choose technology which is flexible enough to adopt the process

2.       Technology should be easy to use and user-friendly

3.       Plan long term architectural strategies in technology

Conclusion

Agile transformation can be carried out by working together hand in hand with three pillars, people, process and technology. Its impossible to transform organization without having proper balance in these three pillars.

PRINCE2® - benefits for IT Firms

Introduction

This blog explains about how PRINCE2 (project management in controlled environment) can help IT and related domain companies to manage projects in an effective way.

About PRINCE2®

PRINCE2® is globally recognized and accepted project management practice which is generic and used by all vertical firms. The concept of PRINCE2® is very flexible and can be easily tailored as per the project requirements. Its principles proven and there is always best project delivery success rate.

PRINCE2® methodology can be adopted to any size of the project and in any type of the organization. All the key activities are addressed very effectively in PRINCE2®. It covers the main areas required for project management like risk, Planning, Change and progress.

Courtesy: axelos-prince2-foundation

PRINCE2® methodology is based on its 7 Principles, 7 Themes and 7 Process.

Reference from: axelos.com

The 7 Principles	The 7 Themes	The 7 Process
Continuous Business Justification	Business Case	Starting a Project
Focus on Products	Organization	Initiating a Project
Mange by Stages	Quality	Directing a Project
Manage by Exception	Risk	Controlling
Tailor to Suit	Planning	Managing Product Delivery
Learn from Experiences	Change	Managing Stage Boundaries
Roles and Responsibility	Progress	Closing Project

Benefits to IT Project Management

PRINCE2® is widely adopted project management methodology in the information technology sector. Many organizations are using it to manage their projects and it has helped them to execute and deliver a project in a successful way. My experience of using PRINCE2® and how it benefits to IT companies is explained in below section.

1.       Establishing Organization Culture: Organization culture is one key factor for all companies and it’s very important for those who has peoples as their main assets. Any project undertaken for execution in any organization has big influence of its culture on project life cycle. Its organization philosophy with which it’s heading to achieve the goals. Culture is based on shared attitudes, beliefs, customs and rules.

Culture also includes the organization’s vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits (Needle, 2004).

PRINCE2® 7 principles helps to establish the culture in IT organizations. The continuous business justification teaches people about using the resources and their time effectively and project always running with return on investment. Its also helping in setting up roles and hierarchy culture.

2.       Setting up Consistency: This is a very important factor in the project execution and PRINCE2® s seven processes helps in setting up the consistency in the projects tasks. Adopting the PRINCE2® process allows the project manager to execute project with consistent stages. All the stakeholders are able to drive the project to its objective.

3.       Allow Tailoring: PRINCE2® allows people to customize it as per the organization and project needs. Most of the IT projects are of short duration and it’s important for all the stakeholders to conclude project successfully by achieving its desired objective and for that there might be certain things to be customized or standardized and this methodology allows to do that very flexible way.

4.       Continues Business Justification: The continues business justification is the key principle of Prince2 and its very much aligned with all the organizations. All IT firms can establish concrete trust with their vendors only by listening to their vendors, understanding them and acting for their benefits. The continuous business justification principle allows these firms work continuously with their vendors by justifying the business.

5.       Managed by Stages: IT companies are executing large and complex projects which run for several years. Prince2’s managed by stage allow these firms to break the work in smaller phases and manage them effectively. Dividing work in small phases with demo able milestone provides transparency in all stakeholders.

Conclusion:

PRINCE2® is tested and proven project management practice adopted by multiple organizations all over the world. Understanding the PRINCE2® deeply and implementing it as per organization’s philosophy will benefit to organizations as well as the employees. Its 7 principles, themes and process are closely mapped to each other and allow organizations to scale as per their needs.

Typical Approaches and Agile Tailoring

In agile development Time-and-Materials model is the most suitable and efficient for both customers and vendors. Taking into account of unstable market conditions and bringing the comfort to both the parties we need to come up with some typical approaches and tailoring of the agile values.

Whether we like it or not, fixed-price price projects with Agile are a reality. Each contract will have its own set of problems and will need a unique solution. In the end, how easy or hard it is to go for a fixed-price price with Agile will mostly depend on how well the customer understands agile principles. Usually small scale projects are suitable for fixed price model.

Below are three approaches suggested to carry out fixed price projects by with agile concepts by tailoring some of the agile concepts. These three approaches needs to be used in different scenarios with its individual execution method.

First Approach: Knowing each other’s (customer and vendors) domain well

There will be different scenarios while doing the contract with customer. Sometimes requirements will be very clear. Client will have clear goals, no more confusion to development team, everything is feasible. With this scenario we can execute the FP project with agile method by using more important agile values.

Situation:

1.      Should have good trust level in between customer and vendor

2.      Requirements are clear with approach and approved by customer

3.      Technically all the features are feasible

4.      Delivery confidence is high

Tailoring:

1.      Follow “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” As Is

2.      Need to alter second value “Working software over comprehensive documentation”, here we must need customer approved task plan, approach and milestones

3.      The third value “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” has no impacts and do not have importance in this scenario as we already have the contracts and requirements in place.  So here we do not required much customer collaboration and negotiations.

4.      The fourth and final agile principle value is “Responding to change over following a plan”. This is the core value of agile principles. Here we must need to avoid any change which will lead to scope change and extends the timeline. Smaller changes can be accepted which can be easily done without extending the timeline and scope.

Execution Instructions:

1.      Identify the requirement and list each module and tasks.

2.      Prepare the approach document for each task and get it sign-off from customer technical team

3.      Calculate the efforts and plan the team accordingly with respect to contract cost and profitability

4.      Take the priority items on top and plan two weeks  duration sprint

Second Approach: Begin with Time & Material and then move to FP later

This approach can be considered in following situation:

Situation:

1.      When requirements are not clear

2.      Low trust level is between the vendor and customer

3.      Project need to start in quick time and under time pressure

4.      Unknown technology to be used

Tailoring:

1.      As said in approach, start with time and material and for couple of days. Once you reach at first approach situation then start with first approach process

2.      Follow “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” As Is

3.      Need to alter second value “Working software over comprehensive documentation”, here we must need customer approved task plan, approach and milestones

4.      The third value “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” This is now very important in this situation and need to be used very effectively

5.      The fourth and final agile principle value is “Responding to change over following a plan”. In this situation the change requests (CR) can be entertained till team is delivering it with time and material. But once you reach at first approach level and changed your contract type to fixed then do not entertain the CR.

Execution Instructions:

1.      When project is in time and material stage let customer decide the task, priority and its timeline. Team can only give the efforts for planned task.

2.      Co-ordinate with customer effectively to deliver the expected result

3.      Plan the sprint and execute it. Initially let it be 2-week sprint duration and later you can increase it as per the requirement clarity comfort

4.      Deliver the planned work, demonstrate it to customer and take approval on it from customer

Third Approach: Capital cost and Incentives

This approach is little different compared to Fixed price model. In this approach both customer and vendor sits together and decide one cost for the project. Later if project gets completed on time without any hurdles the incentive may be offered in the form of giving additional engagements or projects with high rates. Additional cash can be one of option for incentives.

Situation:

1.      When customer and vendor are new to each other

2.      Team have identified some risks but customer has promised to clear those during development

3.      Sure about technical feasibility but confused for some feature on its  implementation duration 

Tailoring:

1.       “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. Both part of the sentence are important in this value

2.       “Working software over comprehensive documentation”, here we need working software as well as its documentation

3.      The third value “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” Customer collaboration as well as contract negotiation may happen

4.      The fourth and final agile principle value is “Responding to change over following a plan”. Small changes can be accepted. But for massive changes both the parties need to sit together and need to revise the cost

Execution Instructions:

1.      List the priority items and prepare the sprint plan. The sprint duration should be smaller in the beginning

2.      Proactively use management technique to keep customer informed on all front

3.      Be transparent with customer for all the happenings in the project

4.      Deliver the project on time and raise ticket for incentives

5.      Raise warnings and alerts if there is additional work request, change request or any kind of risk in the project

Fixed Price Contract Types

Currently in software industry there is too much demand to go-ahead with fixed price( FP) types of contract.Its always beneficial to the customers rather than service providers.

Following are three main types of FP contract I experienced in my software management experience and thought to share with you.

Types of Fixed Price Contracts:

There are three types of main  fixed price contracts and they are:

1.      Firm fixed price (FFP): This  type of contract is  the mostly used contract type and is acceptable by most of the organisations because the cost  is already committed and is not subject to change unless the scope of work changes. Any cost increases due to adverse performance would be the responsibility of the customer.

2.      Fixed price incentive fee (FPIF): This type of contract gives the customer and vendor some flexibility in that it allows for deviation from performance, with a financial incentive for achieving certain metrics. The incentives are related to cost, schedule, or the technical performance of the seller. A price ceiling is set and any costs above that ceiling are the responsibility of the vendor.

3.      Fixed price with economic price adjustment (FP-EPA): This type of contracts are used for long-term contracts and they allow for some pre-defined adjustments in the contract price due to changed market conditions.

The fixed price projects can be successful with small scale projects with clarity in requirements and scope of the feature is well defined. In today’s mercurial market situation companies are breaking the long duration and high cost project in to smaller and planning them to get executed with step by step. Companies are not ready to go with huge investment due to market situation, competition and unclear goals.

Overall it’s observed that, lack of product goal, unclear requirements and limited budget is forcing companies to execute the fixed price projects with agile methodology. Executing FP project with agile is suitable for customers (buyers) but risky and less beneficial to vendors (sellers). Customer are setting price for the project in advance and expecting the project to be delivered with accepting the change requests. This is the reality of the today’s market and no one go away from it. Here vendors need to come up with some approaches to deal with this situation and continue with business by gaining good profit and more projects.

Below section gives some typical approaches and tailoring of the agile values to make the fixed contracts suitable to customers and vendors.

7 Must have skills for Project Managers

While reading on internet I gone through below  very nice and important article "7 must have skill  for PMs" This is very good survey done by CIO.com and I think each PM must need to read and apply it their profession.

http://www.cio.com/article/2389129/project-management/7-must-have-project-management-skills-for-it-pros.html

1. Be highly organized and a good multi-tasker
2. Take charge and know how to lead
3. Be an effective communicator
4.Know how and when to negotiate
5.Be detail-oriented
6.Recognize and solve problems quickly
7.Possess the necessary technical skills

Agile Key Benefits

Overview

Hello All, This is my first blog in management and specifically agile topic. I have been blogging on SharePoint on my personal blog and recently inactive due to more management related work. After doing some work on project management and working as Scrum Master Role I experienced some magic things which I thought I could share with you. May be this effort help you in your successful journey..!

I have seen some of the important agile benefits in my agile journey and project management tenure which are helping companies to grow vertically and I tried my best way to explain it in below sections.

All the content and images is borne from my mind it has no relation with any other copy right content. I have used some reference only for getting the idea and understanding he importance of the topic.  Wherever I has used reference content and images I have proactively noted that content as courtesy from them.

So now let’s get moved to our main topic. Below are the main six agile benefits I explained in detailed, which I think helping more compared to others in the organization rapid growth.

Let’s understand first how agile is getting adopted industry wide. Below section contains some information from VersionOne survey done for finding the agile adaptation and its impact in industry growth.

Being Agile

Agile has become must have project management methodology for all kind of Industries and its helping them with many more benefits. Agile is now global as lot of companies has adopted it. The VersionOne survey says that all types of industries are now using the agile methodology. Companies who have totally adopted agile have seen measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, employee work satisfaction, and quality work. Below is the survey information which gives the idea how agile is getting adopted in various industry.

Courtesy: versionone, 10^th agile survey report April, 2016

·         95% of the organizations represented use agile approaches in their software development

·         Despite the level of take up by organizations, 53% of respondents indicated that less than half of their teams use agile methods

·         The top three benefits that organizations get from adopting agile approaches are

o    87% ability to manage changing priorities

o    85% increased team productivity

o    84% improved project visibility

Benefits

Using agile for project management gives many benefits. When many and more word comes then it’s always hypothetical and moves our concentration from important points. I always like the fishbone chart to analyze this kind of information and highlights the 20% of key points which are causing the 80% of the result. Its more suits to cause and effects. In this blog I tried to highlight those top six benefits which are important and I think organizations must concentrate those in agile methodology which can give them measurable growth. 

There are many more benefits and each of them helping the organization in their growth. Executing the projects using agile methodology helps the organizations in building the long term relationship with customer in very short time. Agility gives crystal clear transparency about the team, day to day work and shippable result which is get created after every sprint. Every small and medium size venture always looks for early ROI and agile gives them this opportunity. The daily scrum gives the clarity of the work and progress so there are no surprises to client after delivery of the work.

1.       Allows Change: Old methodologies (waterfall and iterative) have work and scope already planned and then it moves to execution. Allowing any change in scheduled plan is very complex in these methodologies and none of the stakeholder is happy about it. This was affecting more to the project sponsors and due to this it’s creating more obstacles in client engagement.

Agile made it very easy, other methodologies were considering change as threat but agile made changes more manageable. It embraces the requirement change. Here it’s important to understand how agile accepts the change. Changing the requirement also does not mean changing the task in between the sprint development. The current requirement get completed in on going and its locked for any kind of enhancement, changes is planned sprint items. When sprint get completed the completed work is delivered and then new story will be added in next sprint to adopt the changes. This process maintains the quality deliverable along with concluding the work in committed timeline.

1.       Transparency: This is one more benefit which is helping the organizations in trust building among all the stakeholders of the project. Client is the sponsor an main stakeholder of the project who is  more sensitive about every happenings of the project. Client always wish to have crystal clear picture of the project in case of team members, their work and the result. Agile provides the SCRUM board, CANBAN boards where all the story and its task listed with sticky notes and this is clear picture o of ongoing work. The board give clarity of the work owner, progress and the likely result after the sprint completion.

Another stakeholder is the team, it’s always demand from the development team for the clarity of the requirement with respect to the scope and time line. Agile give them liberty to decide on both. In sprint planning team get the clarity of the requirement and in poker estimation technique, team decide the efforts. So with this approach team is very clear for their goal in the sprint.  

2.       Shippable Deliveries: As said above every small and mid-size organizations looks for early ROI (return on investment) and there are various reasons for it. Important thing here is that client get shippable product on every sprint completion and it allows client to start earing while investing. Client can put the delivered product in production and start getting revenue from it. In earlier methodologies client get shippable product at the end of the project completion. Agile gave them the platform to earn while investing.

3.       Client Engagement

Agile practice gives very good platform to engage the client and create long term trustworthy relations with them. Client gets very good clarity while working with agile team and that’s the main concerns to them. Product owner is client’s person who is tightly connected with development team and scrum master to know the sprint work. The product owner can attend daily stand up by remaining silent to get insights of project work. After every sprint there is retro and review where product owner gets the more details about work and its velocity. Like this way Agile gives the more flexibility in involving client stakeholder during the project execution. The client gets engaged with organisation

with tight bonding as he get chance to talk to root and branch resource of the company.

4.       Employee Satisfaction and Productivity Increase

Employee satisfaction is the key factor in any organisations growth. Employee must be satisfied about his work. Previous methodologies were very stringent and either do not give any chance to a developer to express their thoughts on requirement or any input on efforts. In agile requirements are explained by product owner and it has proper description and clear scope and acceptable criteria along with stories. Sprint planning meeting gives the platform to the individual member to discuss and understand the story. Once every one from development team is clear about the work then along with scrum master and product owner team gives the estimate using poker planning technique. Over all it’s the individual team member inputs for efforts and their commitment to the deliverable. It has been found and observed every team member work closely with every other team member. Every right result boost the employee’s confidence and their satisfaction towards work. Every team member perform by their best and deliver the result on time. The Tuckman’s team formation stages are also equally important for team building.

5.       High Quality

Quality is the obvious factor in project development. Agile gives quality result to the customer. There are some factors due to which quality hampers, and they are:

1.       Lack of clarity in requirement

2.       Poor understanding of the requirement

3.       Continuous change in requirement

4.       Change in scope of the work

5.       Stringent  or less efforts compared to actual work

6.       Team spirit

 Everyone would confused little here as I said that “Allows Change” as one of the key benefit of the agile and here I am saying it as constraint. It’s important to understand how agile allows the change in the requirement and I have explained it in “allows Change “point.

All the above listed points are proactively get addressed using agile scrum frame work with its component like Sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review and sprint retrospective and due to that its always high quality result in agile projects.

Hope my thoughts helps organisations helps in understanding the key 20% benefits in boosting their 80% growth using agile.