The Internet Everywhere World
The modern organization, whether business, government, or community has to evolve or die in an internet-dominated environment.
Software engineering is eating the organizations world.
To protect and expand its mission, the organization must embrace the challenges of an internet-everything reality, and own the internet-centric software development process through efficient, pragmatic, and effective use of people, technology, and time.
Now Change Future
Now, Change, Future- 1: Now: current state of system/thing
- 3: Change: what energy, time, information is required to work the change of state
- 2: Future: future state of the system
Project Frameworks
There is a spectrum of formal project management frameworks from lean methods to more formal and intensive.
- Kanban: uses a columned board and suits bug fixes and continuous improvement. Breaks down with larger teams and task lists.
- Scrum: a weekly or biweekly cicyle of team planning, daily scrum meetings (standups), sprint review/demo and sprint retro.
- SAFe Scaled Agile Framework Enterprise: there are four configurations available for large organizations to implement scaled agile, Essential SAFe, Large Solution SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, and Full SAFe.
- PMBOK: The Product Management Body of Knowledge is a very formal and heavy method that is used by large, formal organizations such as government or engineering corporations.
- Six Sigma: is a formal and structured project management framework used to continuously improve especially in manufacturing.
Scrum
Scrum is a popular lean Agile framework that encourages a regular cadence of teamwork and collaborative problem-solving. Even if the organization chooses a formal company framework, culture and people will implement their own flavor or hybrid.
Miro has a good article describing the differences between Kanban and Sprint. https://miro.com/blog/scrum-kanban-boards-differences/
- Product Backlog: product owners & managers create the product backlog list of features, requirements, improvements, and bugs. The product backlog is input or the source for the sprint backlog. The product backlog is constantly curated and maintained by product owners to match a dynamic market or environment.
- Sprint Backlog: work items such as stories or bugs are selected by the scrum dev team in this sprint cycle.
- Sprint Goal: is the incremental output of the work done during the sprint and should be a tangible and concrete output.
Cross Functional Technical Program Management in a Modern Organization
- Software Eats the World
- Start Small and Grow Organically With the Company
- Executives and Management want to see roadmaps and Gannt charts
- Product Developers want to see agile iterative processes
Business Documents
Documentation is key to communicating and organizing. Examples include;
- Business Documents / Artifacts
- Product Specs
- Customer Experience Design
- Service Design
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Project Management Systems
- Project Management elements
- Epics, Stories, Tasks, Subtasks, Bugs, Feature Requests
- Every element is assigned an owner for each project
Technical Project Manager
A cross-functional technical project manager must always adapt to the Current Situation.Business Functions
- What existing business functions?
- Probability
- Product
- Software Engineering
- Systems (SOC)
- Networking (NOC)
- Security
- IT
- Logistics
- Facilities
- Design
- Marketing
- Advertising
- Support Tiers
- Sales
- Documentation
- HR
Culture
Culture can be explored by the following questions; 1. What are the existing project management processes, cultures, or historical norms? Different projects styles/formats/approachesMaturity Project Culture
Project Management "Office" becomes the Program Management Office. Individuals working on isolated tasks merge organically into team-based projects which are organized thematically and coordinated into synergistic projects of projects called programs. Avoiding the Project manager as a professional nag by using Google's methods OKR.Communication
- Boards
- Standups
- Shared Language
- System Diagrams
- Change Management
- Change Log
- Product Roadmaps
- Kanban boards
- Scrum boards
- Gannt charts
- Product specifications
- Project work breakdown/"task list" i.e. Epics, Stories, Tasks, Sub-tasks etc Project Progress
- Individual Contributor worklists
- Project Dashboards
- Program Dashboards
- Project Charters
- Motivations: OKR, KPI, performance metrics, delivery, outcomes
- Project Success
- Definition of Done
Project Management and Product Management
- Project managers focus on how and when
- Product managers focus on what and why
