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Enabling a Project Management method means having useful guidance with all the processes necessary to successfully manage a project. The pivot is on the choice of the methodology to pick for our project:  the way of working and how to communicate with the team during all the project length depends from the methodology you chose to enable.

A Frequently asked question from our customer is:” When to use AgilePM? What kind of projects it fits?”

The kind of project you have to manage is the key to understand the methodology to use. Let’s examine together some of the characteristics of the projects that are manageable with Agile methodologies:

• The characteristics of the final output aren’t completely known during your starting-up.
• Requisites could change or develop during the execution of the projects.
• Frequent changes are required.
• The user wants to receive some benefits before the closing of the project itself.
• The product to realize can create incremental business value.
• Your working environment is subject to continual change.

 

4 things to know before using Agile Project Management (AgilePM)

AgilePM is the one and only Agile methodology addressed to Project Management. It could be a good compromise between enacting a Project Management framework and putting into practice Agile principles.

The question is: "Is your team ready to enable AgilePM to manage a project?"

Below the 4 key points to successfully enact the methodology:

1. The business vision leading the project has to be clear enough and understood by all the project members. If the vision isn’t shared and understood within all the project members, the risk is to focus on details of low importance not enacting a good time-management. The Agile  Business Consortium suggests a simple question to be answered in order to understand if the activity we are performing is aligned with the strategic vision: “Doing this activity put me closer to the realization of our vision?”
2. All team members are aware that the project will be successful if and only if the product will be delivered respecting the criteria of acceptance and according to the agreed scheduling. In an Agile Project, everybody is focussed on the business drivers and on delivering on time. The pursuit of perfection is not recommended.
3. All project members accept that the requisites will be sketched during the initial phase and the details will be caught and defined during the development of the project Going in-depth with the definition of the requisites during the initial phases is very risky and it could end in a miscalculation: it doesn’t allow the development of the solution during the processes requiring an approach addressed to “change control”.What matters is that the team knows WHY the final solution is important (the scope and the benefit that the project will generate). So, be sure that the results catch the business exigencies not being a pre-fixed solution.
4. All the team members accept that change to requisites is unavoidable and only by accepting change is possible to deliver the right solution The development team has to accept change in order to deliver an optimal solution. The necessary changes have to have the priority on the overall workload.

 

Why these key-points are fundamental?

An Agile project is considered successful if respect the boundaries of time and quality. Is very important that the project team is aligned with these and the other criteria enlisted in the Project Approach Questionnaire (PAQ) developed by the Agile Business Consortium. It is a checklist comprising 17 bullet points which are very useful in evaluating if the Project Success Factors have a good chance to be fulfilled.

The answers to the PAQ will have an impact on how the project will be managed.

PAQ can help you to evaluate all the risks linked to the choice of a particular Agile method moreover, it can guide you to understand the risk linked to the overall project success. Download your copy here!

   

Nowadays IT leaders and IT professionals are faced with an increasingly fast and demanding world. They must deliver effective IT services at an increasingly rapid pace, meeting an extreme competitive demand. In order to successfully face all these challenges, there is only one imperative: improve skills.

ITIL 4 expands on previous versions by providing a practical and flexible basis to support organizations on their journey to the new world of digital transformation. The applicability of ITIL is now much broader, with a particular emphasis on

• the world of business and technology,
• how it works today,
• how it will work in the future with Agile, DevOps, Lean, IT governance, leadership,
• digital transformation.

 

You got ITIL 4 Foundation certification. What about other ITIL v4 modules?

After obtaining the ITIL 4 Foundation certification, you can continue your ITIL journey with one of the four new ITIL 4 Managing Professional (MP) stream modules. ITIL 4 Managing Professional modules provide practical and technical knowledge that can help you successfully manage IT services, teams and workflows.

Two modules are already available:

• ITIL 4 Specialist: Create, Deliver and Support (CDS).
• ITIL 4 Strategist: Direct, Plan and Improve (DPI).

The other two ITIL4 modules will be launched in 2020:

• ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV).
• ITIL 4 Specialist: High Velocity IT (HVIT).

QRP International organizes accredited ITIL 4 CDS and ITIL 4 DPI courses in Zurich. We will add the other two courses as soon as they will be published by Axelos. How these two modules help you to improve your IT skills?

 

ITIL 4 Create, Deliver & Support (CDS)

helps you to become a ‘Specialist’ who can:

• Effectively measure service performance and improve efficiencies.
• Integrate new technologies into IT and digital services.

Follow the link to learn all the details about this module and to know the dates on our calendar: ITIL 4 CDS.

 

ITIL 4 Direct, Plan & Improve (DPI)

helps you to become a ‘Specialist’ who can:

• Build strong and effective strategic direction and break down siloes.
• Direct organizational change and develop essential change management techniques.

Follow the link to learn all the details about this module and to know the dates on our calendar: ITIL 4 DPI.

 

Do you have questions about ITIL 4 Streams? Do you want to train your team or would you like to understand which module is right for you? Write to us at switzerland@qrpinternational.com

Do you want to stay up to date on ITIL 4 and the streams after ITIL Foundation? Sign up to our newsletter!

At QRP International we are committed to providing the best quality of training as well as the broadest offer, to make sure we can answer to our customers' needs.

This is what we kept in mind when working to prepare the new 2018 training calendar, now available at this link to be checked out: find out all upcoming dates for your Project, Programme, Portfolio, PMO, IT and Change Management training!

 

OUR TRAINING OFFER  FOR 2020

As ATO (Accredited Training Organization) QRP International offers the full range of Project, Programme, Portfolio, PMO and Change Management accredited training:

• Project Management: PRINCE2, PMP, PM²
• Agile Project Management: AgilePM, PRINCE2 Agile
• Programme Management: MSP
• Portfolio Management: MoP
• PMO Management: P3O
• Change Management: Change Management
• IT Service Management: ITIL 4, DevOps

 

NEED TO TRAIN YOUR TEAM?

Looking for an easy and efficient solution to train your team of colleagues, or department? Get in touch to discover our in-house, tailored and customized solutions!

A Service Manager is usually responsible for defining the final service(s) by managing service level agreements and ensuring services meet the business need.

He/She manages the Service Department team members, measure and analyze work performances, proposes improvements to processes, including customer service interaction (complaints and requests).

 

The role of the Service Manager

The Service Manager main responsibility is to interact with the business team, understand the SLAs and supervise the service team to support and maintain the infrastructures. This professional is responsible to enable value for customers through services.

 

The Responsibilities of the Service Manager

The Service Manager’s common responsibilities are

• Oversee and guide all activities of the Service team.
• Coordinate SLA creations. (through Interaction with the business team).
• Ensure team follows best practices and maintain service level agreements.
• Monitors department issues and client complaints.
• Develop problem management and service improvement plans.
• Ensure customer/business, client, support, technical parties are represented in the definition and evolution of services.
• Offer customer service.
• Maintain customer relationships.

 

The Competencies of the Service Manager

Core competencies of the Service Manager are identifiable in two main skill sets:

• Business Competences.
  • Strategic thinking.
  • Business analysis.
  • Effective Delegation.
  • Managing risks.
  • Prioritization & Time Management.
  • Clear Communication.
  • Business Relationship Management.

• Technical Competencies.
  • Broad technical understanding.
  • Service Level Management.
  • Service Engineering.
  • Customer Focus.

Interim Director of Agile Transformation responsible for agile-adoption in a 650 people strong international division and 350 strong UK division of a major financial service provider.  Jon Ward operates in an international context of Agile and organisational change in the financial services, banking, insurance, consumer products sectors, television and retail trade. Author of the book "The Agile Coaches Cookbook", we interviewed him on the most interesting topic of the moment: Agility and project management.  

1. What's your current job title?

I am an Enterprise Agile Coach. What does that mean, you may say? I am responsible for the planning and organisation of moving a group of people from traditional ways of working to new agile ways of working. I act as a catalyst, providing training and coaching to teams and senior managers as they switch project delivery methods. I design and implement a new project management eco-system so that project teams are enabled to deliver high-quality solutions faster.

 

2. What do you actually do?

I find that I spend about thirty per cent of my time correcting middle or senior management “myths” about agile. For example, you cannot be agile unless you: deliver to a customer every sprint, have co-located teams, have the customer embedded in the team and so on. The proponents of these views are usually trying to find means of establishing an exemption from the new ways of working – they sometimes provide interesting coffee breaks!

Then I spend a chunk of time measuring and forecasting. Senior Management always wants to know the impacts of their transition to agile. I am required to continually answer the questions like; are the projects going faster, are we being more efficient, if I make a further investment in automated testing tools what will be the likely payback? Lastly, I get to work with the teams: Teaching and coaching agile practices and trying to avoid becoming “fake agile”. Agile is a dish of many spices and some people think that if a team is using scrum it is agile. This is quite far from the truth as getting to the right solution is as much about agile requirements modelling and agile quality practices as it is about Scrum. So “fake agile” is about avoiding doing agile - the ceremonies and so on, but becoming agile – ability to deliver faster, rapidly pivot and work with collaborative teams displaying empirical project control.  

3. How did you come to Agile project management career?

I think that Agile project management came to me rather than the other way round. I started my career working on Concorde and the Harrier jump jet. I worked in production control we used a board to plan the stages of production of components, assembly, test and so on. Later I learned the term Kanban used to describe this effective planning and control process.

I headed off into a traditional Project Management career and then moved to establish a project management consultancy. We had just over one hundred consultants with bases in New York, Frankfurt and London we focused mainly on financial services. Over time I noticed that traditional project management skills had become a commodity and demand for project management consultancy reduced. Then in 2007, I was asked to introduce Scrum into a software house in South London. I saw amazing results from this team in terms of control and efficiency. From then on I started to use some Agile Techniques in the context of traditional projects. For example, working for a global American bank in Chicago I introduced BDD into the waterfall requirements process. We halved the time for the requirements stage and what’s more reduced the number of requirements misses in UAT from approximately seventy per cent of defects to less than ten per cent. From then I took an on-line Scrum Master course, attended a Discipline Agile Masterclass and qualified as a SAFe Program Consultant. For the last two years, I have acted as Director of Agile transformation leading a team of coaches to improve business performance.  

4. What's the biggest issue/change you see in the Agile community at the moment?

I think there is a significant challenge in the agile community about implementing organisation-wide agile. Some people think this means “agile-at-scale” this is far from the truth. The agile-at-scale frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, S@S, Nexus and so on) provide means of combining a Scrum team of between 5 and 9 individuals so they can deliver larger pieces of work.

The frameworks provide guidance on organisation, planning and control processes for large teams using Scrum or Kanban as their control mechanisms. There is a misconception that an agile-at-scale framework will define mechanisms at an organisational level to enable it to be agile. They don’t! As with the PMI or PRINCE2 guidance, an organisation needs to tailor the agile processes and practices provided by a framework to suit their organisational context. However, care needs to be taken to avoid taking off the waterfall straitjacket and replacing it with an agile one! Agile builds upon the energy, creativity, and knowledge of the team to define and deliver appropriate solutions any organisation-wide agile approach should maximise the impact of this human potential.  

5. What tips could you give to our community regarding your past experiences?

I have a mantra:

"Agile without metrics is anarchy. Agile without quality is pointless."

My tip is this: focus on the numbers used in the agile ceremonies. Make sure the numbers in planning, forecasting and control add up. Allow the numbers to illustrate the empirical control is effective. Publish numbers to senior management (not inter-team comparisons please!) so they may see the improvements being made. Secondly, focus as much on getting the right requirements and delivering those exactly as the focus you apply to the agile ceremonies. Quality solutions don’t happen by accident they happen by design. Use shift-left techniques to manage quality.

 

6. What are three things that you would like to learn in the next future?

Albert Einstein famously said, “Once you stop learning, you start dying” Since I don’t wish to start the latter! I seek to learn as much as I can. Unlike a journey, in my view, there is no end to learning. Agile is a dish of many spices I want to know more so that I may help organisations become more efficient and effective. In this, my approach is – learn. Test, develop.

I want to know more about the use of artificial intelligence to support agile business and teams. It is very clear that some aspects of agile cannot be enhanced “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. However, there are areas where AI can be or should be applied to increase productivity. Testing is clearly one, backlog management and preparation another. The second area I want to learn more about is Agile Quality Assurance. Many teams think that because they use Scrum, they are agile. I want to learn more about how to change behaviour with regards to quality. We often talk about the agile domain expertise with which can help the team. We also talk about issues with quality and testing, getting it “right first time” and so on. I am intrigued by the technical and behavioural skill set needed to become an Agile Quality Coach. Lastly, while when I left college as I mentioned earlier, I used a Kanban board for production control purposes working in the aircraft industry. So I am familiar with the technique. However, I want to know more about planning and organising using Kanban. In particular how to integrate a team producing small work items for many Scrum Teams. Where scale and specialist expertise means that these skills cannot be embedded in the Scrum team in the short term. I want to use PDCA to see if we can do more than simply treat the Kanban team as an external supplier. I also want to know more about how to use Kanban to drive organisational agility – I am talking about the portfolio Kanban concept.  

7. Tell us more about your book "The Agile Coaches Cookbook". What is it about and how did you come up to write this book?

Thanks for asking about the book. In reading and learning more about agile I realised that there is a lot of material written about agile at the team level. However, once you start to look at agile at the organisational level the materials become scarcer.

The Agile Coaches cookbook is exactly that; it provides recipes for Agile Coaches. There are four sections:

• The master chief – tools and techniques for agile coaching, how to create a coaching diary, establishing what type of Agile Coach you are, using a team health check model to determine team interventions and so on.
• Recipes for teams – includes how to get teams started, transitioning from waterfall to agile, getting to a backlog, agile risk management and illustrating project control.
• Recipes for the organisation – includes why is adopting agile so hard, identifying the systemic challenges, coaching sponsors and changing the PMO.
• The transformation dinner party – bringing it all together, stages in agile transformation, preparing a goal-based transformation plan, using the PMO as an agile catalyst, alternatives to agile scaling, agile portfolio management, using metrics to prove success.

The goal of this book is to help Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches to be more effective. An agile transformation is rarely the domain of a single Agile Coach. This book allows teams of Agile Coaches to decide on their “big rules” and to orchestrate their actions in harmony rather than acting as discordant individuals.

  Jon Ward Practising Agnostic Agile, Transformation Director, Coach, Program Director and Change Leader. With more than 20 years of experience, Jon operates in an international context of Agile and organisational change in the financial services, banking, insurance, consumer products sectors, television and retail trade. He is also certified Disciplined Agile and Certified Scrum Master.

What is the right Agile methodology to choose? How can I understand what is the Agile framework that fits the best with my projects and the organizational needs?  

What is Scrum?

Scrum is one of the Agile frameworks, created to give an efficient management answer to the Software Development projects but its guidance and its flexibility are easily applicable to all those projects that require a fast answer to change.

Scrum method was originally formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. It is an iterative software development model used for product development (different from Project Management).

It is the most enabled Agile framework – the result of a survey conducted by VersionOne reveals that about 58% of the Agile organizations adopt Scrum. It was created and developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in the ‘90s. It is an iterative and incremental approach firstly thought to manage software delivery. Scrum is a team-based approach where the development process is divided into several sprints in order to enhance collaboration with the final user. It encourages teams to learn through experiences, self-organize while working on a problem, and reflect on their wins and losses to continuously improve. In fact, its principles and lessons can be applied to all kinds of teamwork. This is one of the reasons Scrum is so popular. Often thought of as an agile project management framework, Scrum describes a set of meetings, tools, and roles that work in concert to help teams structure and manage their work. Finally, the term “Scrum” was taken from a Rugby practice, where it is a synonym of “melee”: it leads to imagining how the development team works; all the involved actors pushing towards the same direction, as to say towards successful product delivery.  

AgilePM, the only methodology for agile project management

AgilePM (Agile Project Management) is the only Agile methodology for Agile project management. It is the result of the collaboration between APMG International and the Agile Business Consortium (previously known as the DSDM Consortium), it highlights the perfect balance between the standard structured approach of project management and the flexibility and agility typical of all Agile methods. It is a methodology that can be used when all the characteristics of the final product aren’t perfectly defined and, as a consequence, several and repeated requests for change concretize or, the final user wants to receive some of the project benefits before the closing of the project itself. AgilePM was developed to harmonize all the aspects of traditional project management methodologies with Agile to adapt the framework to the high-paced continually changing working environments.  

Scrum or Agile?

We hear very often the question “AgilePM or Scrum?”; apparently there is a trend towards learning and applying a single methodology/framework for all the projects and into all the environments. Actually, it would be tremendously useful to know both methodologies in order to choose the one to adopt case-by-case. The working environment and the kind of project should indicate what method to use and not vice-versa, adapting the project/product to the chosen methodology is always the wrong approach!  

Scrum is a product development framework whereas, AgilePM is a project management methodology.

  Contrary to common belief, the two methods in real life are perfect pairs. In Scrum we won’t find the concept of “project”, that’s why complex organizations using Scrum should apply an Agile approach also at the organizational level. For example, an organization that already has applied Scrum could also be interested in adopting AgilePM: Scrum is focalized on the product delivery, so it can be used to develop products while managing the overall project by applying a Project Management framework such as AgilePM. Scrum, as also declared by its authors, is a framework simple to understand but difficult to apply. Organizations can utilize Scrum to let the customers feel close to the project and to quickly meet their needs during the whole length of process development, but they shouldn’t forget the importance of Project Management. Scrum is a useful tool when handling complex projects because it allows to dynamically adapt to situations and to realize products that fit the exigencies of the final user effectively and creatively. AgilePM could be the right solution for organizations requiring to adopt a project management framework in a fast-paced environment where change can be efficiently and effectively addressed by Agile. It is particularly addressed to all those organizations that due to complex governance reasons need to define the project guidelines since the first phases. If you or your organization are looking for an Agile method to manage projects or non- software products in a lighter way than “traditional waterfall project management”, AgilePM could be the right methodology for you.  

Are you looking for an overview of the 3 most famous Agile methodologies? Download our free article!