An adaptive digital project management system for hardware product development must be able to balance short-term adaptive microplanning, typical of agile approaches, with long-term planning, typical of waterfall systems. This makes it possible to manage the long development time of physical products.
Summary of the requirements of Adaptive Project Management
In this article I go into detail about the requirements that such a planning system should have in order to enable hardware product development:
Based on experience over many years of physical product development, the functionality of a planning tool can be summarized as follows:
- Multilevel planning
- Flexibility and Self-Organization
- Multi-projects
- Sustainability
- Visibility
- Sharing or Community
- Integrated time reporting
- Real-time measurability
A - Multilevel planning
It is necessary to know how to manage three levels of planning within adaptive project management:
- Long-term planning
- You need to be able to manage a project milestone plan
- Long-term iterative and incremental development requires a functional release schedule to meet milestones
- High-level deliverables that will be released within each release should be identified
- High-level deliverables should be properly estimated
- Mid-term planning
- Medium-term planning is for the release under development and the next release
- High-level deliverables of must be able to be broken down,
- Milestones contained within the release should be identified
- Short-term planning.
- Scheduling micro-deliverables related to the steps or iterations contained within a relase
B - Flexibility and Self-Organization
Dealing with changes requires that people can easily self-organize their work and can easily update the related micro-planning.
Ad intervalli regolari è necessario agire sul piano di medio e lungo termine.
This requires high levels of adaptivity, and the planning tool must easily enable this mode.
C - Multi-projects
It is necessary to know how to manage multiple projects in parallel (multi-projects) that employ shared resources that are committed part-time to each project.
This is the typical situation in physical product development where a multiplicity of skills are required. many of them employed part-time.
It must be possible to easily manage multi-project work by reorganizing one’s activities in an integrated way.
D - Sustainability of the workload
People engaged in projects should be allowed to balance the personal workload in agreement with other people in the team or teams of which they are part.
Load leveling, which is necessary for its sustainability, can only be self-managed, in agreement with the project leader or department/domain leader.
The scheduling system must allow for real-time evidence of personal workload and team load.
It must also allow for easy multi-project replanning to level the load itself.
E - Visibility
It is important to have effective and efficient immediate visibility of projects.
Project information radiators (information radiators) give a qualitative indication of the project and are more effective than numerical radiators.
Interactive digital boards with virtual post-it notes are essential.
Histograms and graphs, traffic lights and more, integrated with the boards allow real-time understanding of project progress.
F - Sharing or Project Community
To make possible planning that dynamically adapts to what emerges from development and context, it is important to be able to share information in real time.
It is important that the information is consistent with the development context and thus related to the elements of the planning system.
This gives life to a virtual project community.
This overcomes the limitations of e-mail-based communication, which cannot be integrated with planning elements.
G - Integrated time reporting
It is appropriate that each element of the planning should be managed directly by the person concerned and can have an integrated time reporting.
This provides an immediate comparison between planned and actual work on each element of the project.
These modes that allows for improved personal planning.
H - Real-time measurability
A project is characterized by a multiplicity of indicators to measure its progress.
A digital planning web tool contains a significant amount of information that is constantly updated by people on the project team.
An integrated business intelligence system facilitates the construction of customized reporting.
