Enterprise Agile Development - Why you still need Project Managers

I've been asked lately about the role of project managers on agile or SCRUM teams. While project managers can perform specific roles within the team, they often perform functions that go beyond the scope of an agile team's direct responsibilities. Some specifics:
  • Scrum and agile are very team and inward facing. Project managers help manage all the external dependencies including vendors, suppliers, partners, infrastructure teams, security concerns, etc.
  • Another way of saying this - who do you think should handle the 'big' blocks?
  • Enterprises often require more medium and long term planning beyond the story backlog that a product owner maintains. Project managers should be tasked with this scheduling.
  • Enterprises ask for cost estimates. Project managers provide them.
  • Project managers should be tasked to capture development metrics. Specifically, there will come a point where a stakeholder will challenge whether or not the team's estimates are accurate or if they are committing to full capacity. Project managers help arbitrate in these circumstances.
  • Story writing in a large enterprise can be complex, especially when multiple stakeholders representing different concerns need to review and contribute to acceptance criteria. Project managers oversee the story writing process to insure proper governance and completion.
  • Agile practices evolve. Project managers are often tasked with process improvement.
  • When you're working with multiple teams and resource pools, project managers can adjust team sizes/skills based on demand.
  • Project managers most often double as business analysts. They can often perform data, workflow, and other analytics that your development team can manage.
  • Most projects are not developed fully in house. When outsourcing a component is an option, project managers can help develop RFP's and review vendor options.
Make sense? I'm sure I'm leaving out some details.
continue reading "Enterprise Agile Development - Why you still need Project Managers"

Offshore Agile Development - Totally Feasible!

I just returned from Chennai, India where I had the pleasure of working with a relatively small team of developers. We started working with them a year ago with the simple goal of getting one project completed for Business Exchange. Over the course of the year, we've tripled the size of the team and now have several teams practicing agile development similar to how we do it on site.

Myth: You can't practice agile development offshore

Many managers will tell you that offshore development is best practiced when you can develop a really good spec of requirements. But I assure you, we're not the only group practicing offshore agile development and by no means experts at this practice. Some offshore service vendors now specialize in agile and the big IT vendors have established practices. Bottom line, it's totally feasible to do agile offshore, but it takes time to establish the process.

Getting Started

The first thing we recognized is that when you practice agile, it establishes and formalizes the timing of your release cycle. We try (and almost always succeed) releasing at the end of each iteration. So for our offshore teams, we either needed to align their releases with our onshore teams practicing agile, or we needed to establish a separate release cycle. The latter just wouldn't work because of product dependencies between the on and offshore teams. So very quickly we needed our offshore team to practice iterative development and release cycles.

From Iterative to Agile

Once we optimized around iterative delivery, there was a collective effort between members of my team as well as our offshore partner to move to agile development. Some key steps in making this work:
  • Invest in basic training. If you're practicing SCRUM, make key members of your teams have some basic training.
  • When recruiting new members, look for people with experience on agile projects
  • Make sure your offshore team members have some understanding of the business, product, and even competition before going agile.
  • Whiteboards and stickies won't cut it when you go offshore. You better have some maturity with an agile project tool before going offshore.
  • Consider on site staffing needs, communication processes, and escalation processes to help establish the practice.
  • Make sure you schedule face to face visits. We had one member of my staff work offshore for three weeks. We also brought one of our offshore developers come on site for a few weeks.
Finally, agile development is always a work in progress. Once you have agile working, make sure your process improvement considers how to improve both on site and offshore delivery.
continue reading "Offshore Agile Development - Totally Feasible!"
Share

About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.