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E-Guide
THE NEW PROJECT
MANAGEMENT FOR
AGILE ALM
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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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