Tag Archives: project management

The Fallacy of Control within Project and Programme Management

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The most liberating day of my career was when I realised that, despite being responsible for the project I was running at the time, I actually controlled very little of what happened. That was the day I freed myself from the “fallacy of control”.

I can’t really control who does what. I can’t really control whether an individual does the work to an acceptable quality. I can’t control whether or not the product owner is going to change their mind about priorities. I can’t control whether the proposed technical solution turns out to be much harder than anticipated or just a dead end.

All I can really do is influence what happens in my programme/project. Spot issues quickly and react appropriately. Lean-Agile gives me the tools to do that.
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Correcting Overcommitment during a Sprint

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As I’ve said before the most common problem I’ve seen with software development teams is over commitment. If worse comes to worst you get to the end of the spring before realising the problem. But you don’t have to wait until the end of a sprint to take corrective action.

Taking Corrective Action mid-Sprint to address Over Commitment

Taking Corrective Action mid-Sprint to address Over Commitment


This post was prompted by a comment, by Chris, on the post where I described what to do when tasks in the Sprint Plan are not finished. My assumption in that post was the team only realises they are overcommitted at the end of the sprint. And for first time teams that is often exactly what happens.

What I didn’t mention is that more mature teams are likely to spot what is going on earlier.
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Revisiting the Iterative Incremental Mona Lisa

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In his brilliant post Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it Jeff Patton used a sketch of Mona Lisa to illustrate the difference between Iterative and Incremental development.

Jeff points out that many Agile people use the word “Incremental” when they mean “Iterative”. I believe this is because, in reality, most Agile projects combine both approaches and become Iterative Incremental. In fact I can’t imagine delivering software in any other way.

To illustrate what Iterative Incremental means I’ve taken Jeff’s Mona Lisa illustrations and added a third showing a combined Iterative Incremental approach.
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When To Measure Lean-Agile Productivity, and When Not To

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Lean-Agile offers two productivity measures: Velocity and Throughput. It is possible to improve both over time but there is little point in management demanding that a development team improve either because both metrics are very simple to fudge.

There is also little point in using either of these productivity measures in product development. The focus is discovery not churning stuff out.

Where a productivity measure is useful is in a project or programme. Where somebody is wanting to know when the team will be finished. Or, conversely, how much functionality will be delivered before the time and/or money has run out.

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How to Manage a Vague or Dynamic Product Backlog

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In response to my request for questions along the lines of what do I do when … ? Jo asked:

What do I do when the product backlog is not complete and we still want to deliver our product on the agreed date? It is hard for the Product Owner to prepare a complete feature backlog and for developers to estimate the required time in order to get a realistic burndown chart during the sprints. The product backlog is kind of dynamic.

In response I’m going to look at three states for the product backlog and strategies for managing backogs when in each of those states:

  1. Normally vague/dynamic
  2. Completely vague
  3. Massively dynamic

The first of these states is, well, normal. You never know everything about the scope. You just have to manage what you do know.

The other two states suggest something is going wrong in the product management space. And that is very much a product owner issue. The agile project manager / scrum master role is to help the product owner and/or organisation realise their problem.
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What is Agile Governance?

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Personally I think good governance is essential for successful delivery, either within a programme or project, or part of on-going product development.

The recent publication of Governance for Agile delivery: Examples from the private sector July 2012 by the British National Audit Office suggests the UK government is also very interested in Agile and how it can be used to deliver value. But within the constraints of good governance.

However the term “governance” is rarely used along side “Agile”. As a agile programme manager I thought I’d try to answer the question “What is Agile Governance?”
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What do I do When Tasks in the Sprint Plan are not Finished?

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This is what having a large number of tasks unfinished at end of Sprint looks like:
Over commitment burndown

Not pretty.

It is best to avoid over commitment so the answer to “What do I do When Tasks in the Sprint Plan are not Finished?” is to lower your expectations next time you go into planning. Using Scrum language you should ensure the team only commit to what is achievable, and that is obviously less than they thought was possible the last time around.

You’ve also got to tidy the up the mess left by the previous Sprint. Have a look at the unfinished tasks and decide if they are necessary for your high priority user stories. If so, then schedule them into the next Sprint. If not, then forget about them.

Finally, you have to decide what credit you can give yourself, i.e. what velocity you earned in the previous Sprint. Personally I start hard line about this. You can only claim a user story if it is completed, so you can only add the story points for that user story if all the tasks have been completed. No partial credit.

Having said that:

  • If you find that the unfinished tasks are actually unnecessary then you can claim credit for the whole user story.
  • It is sometimes possible to split a user story into meaningful sub-parts. If one of the sub-parts has been completed then you can claim the story points of the sub-part for velocity

This post is part of my What do I do When … ? series. Please drop me a line or add a comment if you’ve got a question you’d like answered.

A Lean-Agile Perspective at the Project Research Institute (part 2)

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Last year I wrote a series of blog posts for the Project Research Institute of Athabascau University in Canada. As I mentioned before the PMI’s aim was to introduce their relatively mainstream audience to an Agile perspective. My aim was to show how the principles and practices of Lean-Agile Software Development offer creative solutions to general project challenges.

The PMI has now published all of my posts, including:

  1. Why Lean-Agile is relevant to all Project Managers
  2. A Lean-Agile Perspective on Project Governance
  3. Managing Complexity with Agility
  4. Empirical Project Management: Agile estimation and being “Done”
  5. Agile Experiments in Self-Organization

Programme Management: Build capability, Roll it out, and Deliver Business Benefit

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Some people view programme management as simply the management of multiple projects (see for example Johanna Rothman: Defining Program Management and How Agile Helps).

Although programmes often comprise multiple related projects this definition, for me, misses the real point. As I see it programme management involves three things: building capability, rolling it out and, most importantly, delivering business benefit.

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Reporting Success Stories Alongside Formal Benefits

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Ever since I read "Made to Stick" by the Heath Brothers I’ve been a keen collector of success stories about my programme.

As the programme manager I have to report on the progress of my team. Risks, Issues, Budget, Milestones, Financial Benefits, Reach, etc, etc. Lots of numbers and facts. Terribly significant and rather dull.

So, to spice things up, I also report on success stories.
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