Danh mục: PM Principles

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Lean, Agile, Design Thinking

More and more companies are trying to adopt Lean, Agile and Design Thinking to internal working practices, methodologies. At some certain point, people might feel confused or even chaos to determine what tool they need to use in specific contexts. Some companies might face a situation where tech teams use agile, product teams practice lean and design teams follow design thinking. Are they going in different ways? and where their products will go?

In the Lean, Agile, Design Thinking talk, Jeff Gothelf shares valuable thoughts on how to make those approaches work together:

  • Don’t worry about how we label the process we are following & Hold regular retrospectives to reflect and improve 1 or 2 most important things.
  • Put customers at the center & get alignment, make decisions toward customers’ benefits. Customer value == Busines value.
  • Working in short cycles. So, we have a chance to discover what customers truly need. How the team can move faster or easier.
  • Go and see (or Gemba walk): to find out what works, what doesn’t work with teams. Then, amplify the good things no matter it is lean, agile, or design thinking.

At the end of the day, our customers do not care about what methodologies we are using & those methodologies are actually evolving over time. We should focus primarily on the products, services to deliver value to the customers. Then, we can work backwards to find out what is the better process to do so. 

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Agile mindset in Fixed Price Projects

The title might be controversial as we might think about how Agile can be adopted to Fixed Price Projects and why we need that. The term Fixed Price Projects refer to projects where the funding is fixed regardless of actual delivery cost. Usually, sponsors and stakeholders will expect a defined scope to be delivered within a set schedule as well. That leads us as PM to start a project with the 3 corners of the project management triangle are fixed.

Source: http://lukeangel.co/

Why we might need the Agile mindset in this situation:

  • It’s hard to predict the future when we need to foresee the needed time, effort to deliver the defined scope (sometimes not fully clear in the details). In addition, a variety of risks should also be factored in the estimation.
  • The end results for any projects including fixed price ones are to solve specific problems/ deliver outcomes to relevant stakeholders. The project team and stakeholders need time to validate, align and fully understand the underlying outcomes behind the outputs as defined scope.
  • Changes might be happening on the way, especially for large & complex projects. They might come from new information discovered when executing or from the external business landscape.

How to approach this situation:

  • Influence even before the project started: from the business case stage or before the initiation phase. The defined scope should have priority orders where the highest priority ones directly impact business outcomes.
  • Involve the project team early from the estimation stage: to minimize the gap between expert estimation and actual execution. If the full team is not available, at least we have the estimator to take a leading role in the project to ensure accountability on the estimates.
  • Re-baseline the scope, schedule, scope on a regular basis like fortnightly, monthly. Monitoring the gap between actual delivery versus original plan helps us to identify issues as early as possible. 
  • Even fixed projects, negotiations on scope, schedule, cost are still helpful to reach the highest possible business outcome. For example, lower priority items in the defined scope can be considered to be swapped out or even eliminated by the right reason.

More guidance can be found:

firm-fixed-price-agile-projects, Fewell Jesse, PMI.org

What are your experiences with fixed projects?

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Are you making things that People Want?

Each project/ team has their own mission to build up things or deliver value to related stakeholders. The end result is stakeholders get a better solution to do their work or solve their own problems. In the “Making things people want” blog, Des Traynor proves how problems people face rarely change, and focusing on the unchanged leads us to better outcomes. 

source: intercom.com

How to find out what people want:

    1. Care & understand the longstanding human or business needs. That sets the outcome people wants. It could be travelling without hassle or buying things with a frictionless journey.
    2. Care & understand how people are currently achieving that outcome, might be through some alternative ways.

How to make things people want:

    1. Improve upon the existing solutions. Is it easier to do financial services with a modern digital wallet than a traditional bank?
    2. Make it possible for more people. Can e-commerce allow more people to sell stuff with a much lower entry barrier?
    3. Make it possible in more situations. Social media let people be entertained in a relatively short period like when on a train or even an elevator.

Any other way to make things that people want in your project/ team?