PM for Agile ALM

8/13/2019 PM for Agile ALM

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E-Guide

THE NEW PROJECT

MANAGEMENT FOR

AGILE ALM


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The new projectmanagement forAgile ALM

Designing and imple-menting ALM qualitydashboards

THE NEW PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR AGILE ALM

HANGINGTIMESREQUIREmanagers to ac-

quire new project management skills for

the Agile ALM environment. This E-Guide explores the role of the Agile proj-

ect manager- including key responsibilities, essential skills, and

emerging challenges- and examines how CIOs and senior managers

can best design, implement and use an ALM quality dashboard to

manage ongoing software development projects.

C


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One thing project managers are skilled at is managing change, whether those

are changes in a software application, changes in processes or tools or changes

in their own roles and responsibilities. How hasAgileALM changed the land-

scape for project managers? Are there new skills that the project manager

working in an Agile ALM environment must learn? Is the role of the project

management shifting? Changing times require that project managers learnAg-

ile-savvy skillsto meet the demands of an ever-changing industry.

THE ROLE OF THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER

The discipline of project management has always required a mix of quantita-

tive skills, soft skills and domain knowledge, along with knowledge of specific

project management skills. A good project manager draws on all of these to

achieve the goal of delivering the planned scope on time and within budget.

The same general mix is needed in Agile project management as well, but the

balance shifts more towards soft skills, and to delivering the maximum value

in a specified time period rather than delivering a specified scope by a planned
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date, says Dr. Kevin Thompson, an Agile practice lead at cPrime, Inc.The Agile project manager works more as a facilitator of progress, helping

to remove obstacles that are blocking the teams forward movement, rather

than controlling how they work.

Scrum and other Agile frameworks have opened up opportunities for tra-

ditional project managers to learn a new method of tracking projects using

many of the same skills they used in traditional project management, but with

a different twist, as well as a different title.

There have always been many types of project managers, because there

have always been many types of projects. What has changed is the formaliza-

tion of specific Agile processes, which has led to new formalized roles such as

Scrum Master or XP Coach, says Thompson.

In his soon-to-be released book, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the

Most Popular Agile Process,Ken Rubin, lists these traditional project manage-

ment responsibilities:

Integration Identify, define, combine, unify and coordinate processes

and project management activities.
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Scope Define and control what is and is not included in the project.

Time Manage timely completion of the project defining necessary

resources.

Cost Estimate, budget and control costs to meet approved budget.

Team Organize, manage and lead the project team.

Communications Generate, collect, distribute, store, retrieve and dis-

pose of project information.

Risk Plan, identify, analyze, respond, monitor and control project risks.

Procurement Acquire products, services or results needed from out-

side the project team.

While these tasks still need to be handled, Rubin writes that in Scrum

they are often distributed among Scrum Masters, product owners and other


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members of the Scrum team, and that often a traditional project manager willtransition to one of these roles. For example, Many project managers make

excellent Scrum Masters, if they can forgo any command-and-control man-

agement tendencies, says Rubin. He goes on to say, Frequently, however, the

product owner role can assume as many if not more of these traditional project

management responsibilities than the Scrum Master role.

Another role that those who have a strong project management background

might fill is one called Agile program manager. This role would be one which

would facilitate and coordinate work across teams.

THE PROJECT MANAGER ROLE STILL EXISTS

Certainly there are Agile organizations in which there are still employees who

maintain the project manager title. In some cases, this is because a project

manager is needed to roll up and report on the efforts of multiple Scrum teams.

Companies that have large and complex development efforts sometimes

decide to retain a separate project manager when logistics and coordination

tasks are so overwhelming that the teams cannot be expected to keep up with

them, says Rubin.

In other cases, organizations may be implementing Agile practices other


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than Scrum, and expect their project managers to play a part in helping devel-opment teams with Agile adoption.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) has recently added the Agile Cer-

tified Practitioner (ACP) to its list of certifications. The methodology-agnostic

exam tests project managers on their knowledge of the Agile Manifesto, Agile

principles, XP, Scrum, Lean and Kanban. It requires knowledge and skills as-

sociated with over 40 Agile tools and techniques.

The PMI is what were rebelling against. It didnt feel right, says Mike

Griffiths, an independent project manager, trainer and consultant, in talk-

ing about an Agile certification being given from an organization that has a

reputation for touting the more traditional Waterfall approach to development

and project management. However, with surveys from Forrester and Gartner

reporting that up to 80% of development organizations are now using Agile

approaches, the PMI recognized that they were in danger of becoming less rel-

evant unless they included Agile offerings. Griffiths, a contributor to the new

PMBOK v5, says the new guide will include Agile principles.

CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES

How have changes in technology, such as cloud computing or mobility, affected
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the role of the project manager? Very little, according to Thompson. Tech-nology projects have always been very diverse, and projects in cloud computing

and mobility do not require qualitatively different skills to manage.

That being said, certainly an awareness of changing technologies and how

those might affect a project is something that is important to any project man-

ager, regardless of what his or her title is.

Understanding the ALM tools and organizational alignment is also impor-

tant for the Agile project manager. For example, a firm understanding of how

collaboration is being used throughout the lifecycle will better prepare the

Agile project manager to facilitate stronger communication between business

and IT, development and QA and development and operations.

Agile ALM is about breaking down the barriers between different organi-

zations where roles and responsibilities are not as clearly defined as they once

were. This holds true for the project manager as well. There is a morphing of

roles and responsibilities, and the whole team is expected to help resolve issues,

regardless of their title.

Agile is a mindset and approach to managing work that can be applied to

more than just software development. With the continued growth of Agile in all

areas of business, it would benefit business leaders and managers, regardless
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of their titles, to learn what it takes to add agility to the tasks associated withproject management. While the same types of project tasks are still needed, the

way those tasks are accomplished are changing.

DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING ALM QUALITY

DASHBOARDS

Senior IT managers need to contend with a variety of different software de-

velopment projects going on at the same time. And there is no shortage of

challenges: Identifying the projects and the measures that make sense across

projects, implementing the collection of data from a variety of different sources,

normalizing them across projects of different sizes, selecting meaningful ways

of presenting all this information and eventually using it effectively. Approach-

ing the analysis, design and implementation systematically will make the ALM

quality dashboard simpler, actionable and effective.


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ANALYSIS FOR AN ALM QUALITY DASHBOARD

1. Metrics for the ALM quality dashboard: Metricsneeded for the ALM

dashboard must span evenly all phases of the application lifecycle-- re-

quirements gathering, design, development, testing and maintenance.

They also need to look at the efficiency of collection and effectiveness of

these metrics. For example, an efficiency measure for requirements gath-

ering will need to be balanced with an effectiveness measure like end user

satisfaction. If the end user is not satisfied with the way requirements

are getting addressed in a prioritized, systematic fashion in a reasonable

period of time, they may feel that they are part of a lengthening backlog.

2. Normalization needed across projects: Applications can be small

or large; mainframe-based, client-server or mobile. They may be multi-

year, large-investment projects or short-run, simple projects. The ALM

quality dashboard needs to have more or less the same measures on all

projects so that youre comparing them in a meaningful way. Weighting

projects based on size and complexity is often needed for meaningful

comparisons.
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3. Actionable metrics: The metrics need to be actionable, especially ifthey will be a part of an ALM quality dashboard. The actions flowing

out of the metrics need to be practical and implementable, leading to

improved ALM quality.

DESIGN OF AN ALM QUALITY DASHBOARD

1. Handful of metrics. ALM quality dashboards are useless if there are

too many metrics. The whole idea of a dashboard is that you dont have

time to wade through an ocean of metrics to quickly get a comprehensive

picture of your quality. It is always possible to classify all the metrics you

could measure as primary, secondary and tertiary depending on how

much effect they have on overall ALM quality. Dashboards should focus

on only the primary ones.

2. Display design.An ALM quality dashboard display should be restricted

to one screen full of information, whether its browser-based or a display

that pops up on a laptop, desktop or a mobile device like a smartphone

or tablet. Increasingly, tablets and smartphones are becoming ideal
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vehicles for dashboards.

3. Drill-down capabilities. Dashboards are just springboards for further

analysis. Further action may not be possible without deeper analysis of

the metrics on a dashboard. Drilling down will enable developers to un-

earth these anomalies with statistics.

IMPLEMENTATION, FOLLOW-UP AND ACTION

1. Data from multiple sources:Data forALM quality metricsmay come

from multiple test management solutions, some central and some dis-

tributed. Making all this information flow to a central system for analysis

and action is not trivial. The dashboard system chosen needs to accom-

modate inputs from direct feeds from database queries, reports, spread-

sheets or data in flat files exported and sent. Monitoring of such sources

is needed to ensure that all data from all sources have been received

before the dashboards are generated.

2. Comparable timeline matching: The timelines reflected in the data
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need to be comparable. This is of special importance if some of the datasources are networked to the ALM dashboard software but others are

asynchronous and come through file transfers, spreadsheets or reports.

3. Corrective actions: Corrective actions and feedback are ideally fed

directly from the dashboard to the people responsible for the various

quality metrics. If comments or questions can be emailed directly from

the dashboard to the people responsible for that metric, at that level of

drill-down, it will improve course corrections.

4. Follow-up and loop back:Reporting systems should allow feedback

and discussion on an ongoing basis as part of a feedback loop. Metrics

that are out of range and actions that need to be taken and were taken

should all be available on the dashboard. These capabilities are possible

when dashboards are implemented as part of collaborative software like

Microsoft SharePoint Portal.

ALM quality dashboards need to convey a large amount of critical infor-

mation to IT management for observation, analysis and corrective action. In


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reality, projects could be in various stages of the ALM lifecycle, they could bein-house or outsourced, the development teams could be geographically dis-

persed and the applications themselves may be of varying size and complexity.

Creating a single ALM quality dashboard in such cases is challenging, but if we

focus on a few key characteristics needed from such a dashboard for maximum

efficiency and effectiveness, it can be designed, implemented and used well.


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