Unconventional tools and tecniques for project managers

Unconventional tools and tecniques for project managers Francesco Ciriaci - Better Software 2010 - Firenze

A little about me • Managing Director and co-founder of Reﬂab • Core contributor to Plone CMS development • Designs web solutions and tools for international organizations • Working for Medecins Sans Frontieres, World Food Programme, UNDESA, ... • Working on MioMood (a crazy web startup) twitter: @fciriaci

About this talk • Continues “The fun of a Program Manager” talk (Better Software 2009) • Requires only some agile development knowledge • Aimed to project managers, mainly

Web projects • Short timeframes • High number of involved people (wide team) • Usually (too) many stakeholders • Complex

“The successful completion of speciﬁc project goals and objectives” Constraints (classic): • Scope • Time • Budget Planning, organizing, managing resources

and we have tools for: • planning • resource allocation • time-tracking • tasks and todos • communication (some)

One tool to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them.

Management and reality “We lose touch with reality as we estimate, negotiate, track progress, ...” The tools we are given to help our management can bind us and blind us.

But don’t get me wrong... • those are foundamental tools to have • I use quite a lot of them • some are particularly good to support agile

Project management is also: • identiﬁng problems • solving problem (creating the conditions) • communication • motivate and get consensus In other words: “ good plan is only the a beginning of • manage expectations management” • ...

Projects #FAIL • Unrealistic estimates, schedules, stafﬁng • Unmanaged change Agile development / agile design help to adress • Unclear scope and requirements many of those. • Unmanaged risks • Lack of executive commitment/involvement • Poor communication

Agile Manifesto #1: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools So why are we talking about tools and techniques here?

Agile principle #1 does not mean tools and techniques are not important... it might mean that they have to be ﬂexibly chosen, adapted, even “created”. Stick to reality and be more creative!

Creativity within a framework • Corporate standards • Language • Distance • Simplicity • Availability of resources

Here is a pattern that man has used since the beginning of time to develop tools and techniques... applied to management. 1. Identify the challenges 2. Look for a tool or technique 3. Implement, evaluate 4. Iterate for every project

Let’s look at a few critical challenges we all face. Challenges

Challenge 1: Identify pitfalls asap

Project Tracking (Metrics) Tracking: Communication quality Risks Project Mood ... Tracking tools: Whiteboard Paper Webapps Excel ... Source:Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards by Kenji Haranabe (http://www.infoq.com/author/Kenji-Hiranabe)

Learning from failure • We identiﬁed a common communication & mood pattern (a.k.a. Pre-live Panic) • improved preparation and communication pre-live

Challenge 2: tasks fragmentation

Big visible tasks charts & visualization An eXtreme Programming technique too often underrated, imho.

Kanban Board Shared with customer... why not with all stakeholders in just a cleaner format? HINT: use visuals and the help of the designer to provide the project over view; stakeholders will understand a lot better Source: Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards than a report that often by Kenji Haranabe (http://www.infoq.com/author/Kenji-Hiranabe) few reads.

Challenge 3: UX is everywhere vision over features

Informative Workspace Again coming from eXtrame Programming. Informative workspace can work great to put together not only developers but designers, information, architects, ...

Post-it

http://byjoeybaker.com/2009/05/21/whiteboard-of-mindmapping-new-media/ Whiteboards

Posters and illustrations

and whatever serves your goals Twitter for example...

Challenge 4: Stakeholders in web project = caos Project sponsor Marketing Sales Content Managers Editors User ...

What a tough meeting! Video

At lower scale: metaphors and the Theatre ability to create “visual” representations of the project. Everything that can help reduce the abstraction of our difﬁcult domain.

Screenshots and photos

and again... whatever serves your goals

our model, our understanding

reality if we are very very good and lucky this is what we will have, right?

One tip I particularly like: “spend more time on the software you’re helping to build than on your PM tools.”

Thanks! Francesco Ciriaci francesco@reﬂab.com Twitter: @fciriaci

Credits and resources • The agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org) • Why Web Projects Fail by Graham Oakes • Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards by Kenji Haranabe • Prediction Markets (Project Risk Management) by Inkling • Build Status Using Lava Lamps by Ken Nichols

*bonus tool, just for fun Lego planning

Unconventional tools and tecniques for project managers

by Francesco Ciriaci

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