Some thoughts on project management and Agile management with information on these two key issues in product project management.
Project Management 2.0 (PM 2.0)
In this post, I would like to make a brief reflection on Project Management 2.0 (PM 2.0) tools that I use as support for a physical product development project in agile mode: project management 2.0
I think you can call “balanced” a project with at least 3 solid foundations:
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Tools
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People
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Processes
Agile Project Management Tools
These address the need to share useful project information in real time thus enabling managers, project team members, stakeholders and consultants to get the best results from their projects.
This leads to the creation of a virtual project community with discussions related to project elements, managed in a Web 2.0 environment
This approach is proposed to integrate with the chosen project management methodology and in word areas we could summarize:
PM 2.0 = existing project management + remote collaboration
In particular, the application of the agile, participatory and adaptive approach to physical product development can be greatly facilitated by PM2.0 tools.
Differently from the case of the development of software products where the product owner plays a priority role in defining the stories to be developed, which are refined until they are ready for development (ready), In the case of physical products, the team members directly write most of the stories who agree with the Product Owner.
Agile Development Team: People
In this sense in fact the entire development team gains greater skills in backlog management and ultimately agile project management.
At this point it becomes necessary for the software tool to enable the methodology, and to do this I believe it must be “collaborative,” focusing on collective intelligence by fostering team self-organization, project leadership and productivity as factors in project success.
Particularly based on the experience gained from more than 15 years of engaging web planning tools, the people on the teams become key players in planning.
Similar to the need to know English at a level sufficient to be autonomous, working in teams, often with people in different locations, today requires elementary knowledge of project management.
Project management systems, in version 2.0, are no longer aimed at specialists but directly at development teams, and for this they must have:
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- Effective and efficient immediate visibility of projects, with electronic scoreboards close to the paper-based scoreboards that were employed with manual management. In this way, people on the team can self-organize and easily create, modify and move project elements. In particular, the visual management of the backlog according to the story mapping mode I have seen is appreciated by all the teams I have worked with
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- A mode of real-time sharing of information directly related to project elements and the backlog in particular. This is done by associating each project element with blogs with links to document systems, Wikis, PLMs (product documentation and product lifecycle managers)
In addition, this software must promote Collective Intelligence, that is, enable people to work together in an intersection of common goals, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, understand ideas, use a common language, and learn.
On the other requirements that these software tools must have I will return with another article
