Adaptive project management makes it possible to cope with the complexity of innovative product development.
Indeed, hardware product development requires many skills working simultaneously on a multiplicity of aspects of the product and its development phases. Development is thus strongly influenced by what emerges, and the path to the goal is unpredictable.
A project management system must therefore be adaptive precisely to enable this mode of development.
Concurrent Engineering of alternative solutions to each other
The development of hardware products requires two mutually integrated approaches:
- The development of alternative solutions
- Concurrent design
For hardware products, it is appropriate to design and sometimes develop several solutions, among them alternatives, for the same functionality.
Each solution is compared with alternatives based on a variety of viewpoints including, for example, functionality/usability, environmental impact, cost, and constructability.
This mode is called concurrent design or concurrent engineering where different departments work simultaneously on different aspects and/or phases of product development.
Adaptive project management
Planning is adaptive because it proceeds in small steps with increments and changes in the product, adjusting subsequent ones as they emerge.
The agile team is self-organized and therefore is an actor in planning its own work.
Thus, adaptive project management is a tool in the hands of the team, and because of this it must be easy to manage.
In fact, work planning is not the main task of development team members.
The adaptive agile approach has the limitation of having a limited time perspective, determined by the small number of iterations or steps that can be planned.
So agile planning must be properly integrated to have a time perspective that covers the entire development time, which is normally many months and very often 1 or more years.
In other words, it is necessary to be able to break down the long-term plan into medium-term steps or development releases. Each release contains the high-level deliverables, or macro topics, that will be developed.
In other words, it is necessary to define in detail the backlog with the macro topics, related stories and steps or iterations, of the release under development.
Within each of the small steps or iterations, lean-derived kanban boards are important for tracking the workflow.
It is then necessary to define more crudely what macro topics are to be delivered in subsequent releases.
The release plan is also associated with a series of milestones that are typically those at the end of a release, to which significant others are added within one or more releases.
The agile mode must therefore be integrated with a milestone plan typical of the classical waterfall or waterfall approach.
Planning is therefore multilevel
- Long-term planning characterized by the milestone and release plan
- A medium-term planning with the distribution of macro topics expected in future releases
- Short-term planning that is done within each step or iteration
Short-term planning is extremely dynamic, and is completely up to the people on the team.
In particular, laboratory or product building activities require a visual management mode to manage micro-planning. This enables daily stand-up meetings or laboratory flash meetings (daily meetings) that take inspiration from scrum meetings.
It is also necessary to be able to compare the work delivered against the work planned in order to make proper progress.
Agile that focuses on deliverables and thus delivered value is very close to the Earned Value proper to classical project management.
The development of physical products requires many skills with uneven employment of the same.
Some skills require full-time employment while others require part-time employment.
Therefore, it is necessary to be able to ensure the management of multi-project work for part-time skills.
Based on the experience of many years of physical product development, Agile project management, which appropriately integrates these different planning modes, fits into any hardware product development context.
