project management methodologies

Project Management Methodologies:

According to the book “The Definitive Guide to Project Management” project is a task with a defined beginning and end, to meet unique goals and objectives that will bring some beneficial change or added value to something. With that, the definition of project management is “the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources to achieve specific goals”1.

There are many challenges in the project management, the main one is to achieve all the goals dealing with the restrictions: scope, time, quality and budget. This is called the Iron Triangle of project management because it is very rare to change one constraint (scope, time and budget) without impacting in the other ones and the quality is directly affected by those three constraints.

Another challenge in project management is to optimize the allocation of inputs and integrates them to meet the objectives and goals defined in the beginning. Every project is different, so it is very important to estimate the costs correctly in the beginning and keep track of it during the role project.

Approaches:

There are several approaches to managing projects, in this research I will focus in two of them: the Waterfall and Agile.

Regardless of the methodology implemented, all of them must consider carefully the overall project objectives, timeline, cost and the roles and responsibilities of the participants in order to get the best output.

The Waterfall approach:

Before explain the Waterfall approach I will run through the traditional approach, since the Waterfall is based on it. In the traditional approach there are five developmental components, it is a sequence of steps to be completed during the project. They are:

1-‐ Initiation 2-‐ Planning and design 3-‐ Execution and construction 4-‐ Monitoring and controlling systems 5-‐ Completion

It doesn’t mean that every project should have every stage. Some projects terminated before they reach completion, some go through steps 2, 3 or 4 multiple

Figure 1 - The Iron Triangle of project management

times. Many industries use variations of these project stages. The Waterfall approach is one of those variations, when series of tasks are implemented in a linear sequence.

It has 7 steps:

1. Requirements specification: finding what customer of project wants. 2. Design 3. Construction (implementation or coding) 4. Integration: integrate the design and construction 5. Testing and debugging: ensuring the output of the project meets the agreed

requirements. 6. Installation 7. Maintenance: getting the output of the project working in the real world.

It differs from the traditional approach because in the Waterfall model it is implied that you should move to the next phase only when the preceding phase is a 100% completed and perfected. For example, you just move to coding after the design is 100% approved at tested.

It is usually used in software development because make easier for the team that is working since you won’t have to change problems in the design after coding and will have to do the coding everything again, what is hard and takes a lot of time.

The positive point about this approach is that you spend time early making the requirements specifications at the phase one and defining the tasks for each step, so you save time and effort latter in the process since everything is well defined.

This model works well for small and well-‐defined projects with defined budget, but often fails in bigger ones because of the undefined nature of them it is harder to plan each step and define the requirements before starts.

Because the problems to implement it in some cases there was introduced various modified Waterfall models that Steve McConnell called the Rapid Development models2. The pure approach requires a lot of testing and documents after each step leading you to come back after every step to the requirements specifications. The Rapid Development models allowed you to overlap each phase and create subprojects in one project. But the use of it, as in the pure Waterfall approach, is recommended just when you have your problem well framed and still needs all the requirements defined before starting.

Weakness:

As every model, the Waterfall has your weakness. It is not recommended to use in some cases when clients do not know exactly what they want, what makes hard to do the first requirements. Sometimes needs and limitations appear during the implementation or test phase, so the requirements must change, changing the design and the next phases as well. Other case that Waterfall methodology is not a good choose is when the team that creates or design the software do not know the

capabilities of the technology that will be implemented. That can cause important changes during the implementation phase in order to adapt the idea to the existent technology. This last case was a key point in my last project at Hyper Island. We design an application for Facebook and Pinterest, and because we didn’t know the limitations of the second one, we had a significant delayed on the implementation phase of our application, since we had to change all the idea, what made impossible to deliver by the deadline of the project.

The Waterfall methodology is very rigid so it is not recommended also when the problem constant changes, needing to reframe the phase one and redoing all the work done before.

The Agile approach:

The Agile approach is very different from the traditional model. More focus on the customers need, it is based on the principles of human interaction and human collaboration. It is a very flexible and interactive technique normally used to manage the design and build of new products or services in technology, creative and marketing industries.

In this methodology the project is divided in small tasks that will be executed, as it will be demanded. It is not a pre-‐planned process as the Waterfall approach. Each small task is part of a delivery cycle, called iteration that contains a plan, a small deliverable, test and feedback. Because of this frequent prototypes done after each execution, this methodology is the most consistent in project management, since it gets inputs from customers and individuals from the industry every iteration.

Figure 2: Agile Project Management Iteration

This approach is better used for projects that are too complex to understand as a role, so you divide it in small-‐scale projects or elements to understand better what

you have to do and gain more flexibility to change things. Since you have smaller tasks to achieve (each iteration), this methodology is more dynamic than the one before, enabling the user to refine the requirements of the project if it is needed without loosing much time. Because of this dynamism, the Agile approach it is also recommended when you have a fast moving scenario, unstable situation or undefined budget or final product.

It is very important to get the client actively involved in the project when using this process, so you can develop something that the customers wants and the client also, but it demands a lot of time of the client, what sometimes is hard.

Because of the dynamism of this methodology and the constant testing with the customers, the end product can be very different from the one that was planned in the beginning. It is very important during this process to up date the team and the client. There are many techniques used in the office to make sure that everyone is updated, the Scrum is the most popular one in creative and new technologies business.

The Scrum:

The Scrum is the main tool used at the Agile project management. The project is divided in sprints – 2 to 4 weeks phases of work that the deliver is completed, tested and documented. The sprints should be planned in a meeting with all the members before it starts. There they will define the goal and assign each individual responsibilities.

Everyday there will be a 15 minutes meeting to report the progress, discuss what will be done today and what is needed to ensure that the task will be done. Those meeting are important to update the team of the status of the project and changes that occur.

Roles of the team members:

1-‐ Product owner: the expert on the product being developed. In most of the cases is the direct contact between the client and the company.

2-‐ Scrum master: is the responsible for managing the process, making sure that everyone is updated and understanding the process. This person is also responsible to reallocate the resources and help everyone complete your task. Normally is the project manager or some one with high facilitation skills.

3-‐ Team: the people working on the project. They have freedom and ownership about their tasks to change the approach when needed.

When the sprint is over, the scrum master should organize a retrospective meeting to reflect about the process and to decide what need to be improved for the next sprint.

Figure 3: Scrum

Other tools used for support the project management:

As the Scrum, there are several tools used to support the project management that are less specific for the approach chose.

The Scrum is very specific for the Agile methodology, but there are other tools to support the project management. The importance of those tools is to keep the team aligned and updated about every step of the process and help the project manager organize the scope, time, budget and quality.

There are several softwares that help that process, giving tools to organize the tasks, goals, team, emails, finance and calendar, as Trello, Lighhouse and Basecamp.

To organize the testing and keep track of bugs when you are developing a software or website, there are programs as Jira and 16bugs. With that the project manager has a historical of the problems and how it was solved.

It is important to document every step of the process, and those softwares help on that. For meeting, calls, interviews or focus groups is important to document then recording and writing summaries so you can keep track of the evolution of the project, feedback and inputs. To share those documents the servidor of the company, Dropbox or Google Drive can be used but the Google Drive is more efficient since you can see the changes while the other user is doing it, not needed to update every change, and you can aces remotely.

When working remotely, to communicate between the members of the team, instant messages are very useful because speed the communication. But for more complicated and longer topics calls and emails are better. Applications as Skype and Activecollab enable the members of the team to do remotely conferences and increase the collaboration between the team.

Reflections:

From my previous experience in workplace and Hyper Island it is very hard to use one methodology as it was developed. It is needed to make arrangements so it will make your work more efficient.

During Hyper Island, since the communication with the client was limited, the Waterfall approach was used in most of the projects since the problem was previous framed and defined, this approach was more efficient to define the tasks for each member of the group and it was reduced in just the first four steps. Not having a final product in most of the cases made easier to implement this methodology since there was no testing, so was rare the cases that we had to came back to the first phase and redefine requirements, goals and objectives. It was just needed if someone from the group pointed some problem during the design or implementing phase. In the order hand, it is impossible to know, besides by the feedback gave from the industry leaders, if our solution will work if installed.

For the Run a Creative Business module was the first time that we tried to implement the Agile methodology. Since it was a bigger group and more tasks than the normal, was important to implement a methodology that allowed us to keep track of the role of each member and someone to facilitate the needs of the team. We had to adapt the methodology because there was more than one project for the team, and we had to do smaller sprints since we had just 4 weeks to do the project. The Scrum meetings were essential for us, being the only time that the entire group was together, so we could up date everyone and manage the sources to make sure that all the tasks were done by the deadline. The meeting with all members took a long time, so we restructured and the meetings to plan the sprint were done just with one member of each project, keeping the reflections and daily meetings with everyone.

The experience in the last module, Showcase, was different. We decided to keep the Waterfall methodology, since we were a small group with a very clear goal and objective, but the lack of knowledge from us about the technology that we wanted to develop reflected in delays in our project. Because since the beginning for all of us was very important to delivery something done and tested in the market, we had to change our idea and start everything again. For that, we decided to implement the Agile methodology, again with shorter sprints, so every member of the team would have a clear task and Scrum meeting were done everyday, to force us to delivery results faster than in the other approach. In that case, was very important the flexibility gave by the Agile methodology and the meeting were very useful to update and reallocate the member of the group. In the end, was very positive the change, and we were able to delivery two final products. I believe that was possible because when you have clear tasks divided you create an ownership for that task, what encourages you to work harder to see the final product.

Conclusion:

The two main keys to a project to success are good people and good planning. To meet all the goals of the project it is important that the project manager keeps

everyone that is working motivated and interested and simultaneously keeps the customer satisfied.

Because of this last experience, I believe that when planning digital projects the Agile methodology can be the best way to manage your project. The Scrum meeting are very useful to make the team aligned and the ownership created by dividing the tasks is very important to make everyone motivated.

The only occasion that I fell that the Waterfall process can be better is when you have a small project, with the problem and final product already defined. Using the Agile in that case can make the team waste time and go though processes that is not needed.

But it is rare the projects that have everything defined, most of then change a lot during the time, and you find out more about the customer’s needs during the testing.

About the tools, I believe that the Scrum is essential when using the Agile methodology, but adaptations should be done depending of the project, company or people involved. A place to store the data, as Google Drive, is important as well, but other tools I believe that you should test and see if the team adapts to then. To organize the tasks of the project, from my experience, Trello is the software with the better user experience and more intuitive to learn how to use.

References:

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Figure 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Agile_Project_Management_by_Planbox.png

Figure 3: Anderson, A. 2013. Untitled paper, paper presented at A little bit about agile & scrum, Hyper Island, Manchester, UK, July, 4.

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