Review Part 2: Project Management, Stakeholders, Teams, and Communication
Project Management, Stakeholders, Teams, and Communication
Project Documentation
Project Charter: A summary project proposal used to secure approval for the project goals and terms, which is useful as part of a Business Case.
Project Management Plan (PMP): An approved document showing how to achieve the approved project goals and benefits. It provides the details on how to execute and manage the project and is used as part of the mobilization and on-going management of the project.
Agile Documentation
Agile development is often misunderstood as eliminating the need for documentation. While Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation, it does not dismiss documentation entirely. This misconception stems from the Agile Manifesto's emphasis on working software.
Agile Encourages Smart Documentation: There are project situations in which documentation is absolutely required, such as for User Stories, Flowcharts, Wireframes, Client Meetings, and Regulatory Requirements. Agile promotes 'just barely good enough' (JBGE) documentation, which is sufficient to support the project without overburdening the team. Documentation is created 'just in time' (JIT) when it is needed, not upfront, to avoid outdated or unnecessary details. The focus is on living, collaborative documentation that evolves with the project.
Why Document in Agile?: Documentation in Agile is important to meet stakeholder requirements and maintain organizational memory, to support communication with external groups like software outsourcing teams, for audit and compliance purposes, and to present, clarify, and solidify complex ideas.
What to Document in Agile?: Items to document include the product vision, overview, design decisions, requirement documents, and operation documents, among others. Scrum Artefacts are also key documentation. This information is used by a Scrum Team and stakeholders to describe the product being developed, the actions undertaken to produce it, and the actions performed during project execution. It is essential for every Scrum Team to enable transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
Software Project Issue Management
Record issue (discrepancy report): An issue needs to state the difference between observed and expected behaviour. The report should also include the Software Version, who reported the issue, when it was reported, and how to reproduce it.
Analyse issue: The issue is analyzed to determine whether the observed behaviour is the specified behaviour.
Categorise issue: The issue is categorized based on the analysis. If the observed behavior matches the specified behavior, it may be a change request for the expected behavior. If the observed and specified behaviors differ, it is a defect.
Change requests: These are managed through a different process than defects. They have cost implications, which can vary depending on the contract type (e.g., fixed-price vs. time-and-materials). Change requests may end up in the product backlog.
Stakeholder Management
Stakeholder Identification: Stakeholders can be categorized as internal or external. Internal stakeholders include shareholders, employees, board members, sponsors, project managers, management, and the project team. External stakeholders include end users, customers, suppliers, governments, unions, local communities, the general public, other related institutions, and competitors.
Power/Interest Matrix: A tool used to classify stakeholders based on their level of power and interest. Stakeholders with low power and low interest should be monitored. Those with low power and high interest should be kept informed. Those with high power and low interest should be kept satisfied. Stakeholders with high power and high interest must be managed closely.
Stakeholder Engagement: Stakeholders can have different levels of engagement with a project.
Unaware: Unaware of the project and its potential impacts on them.
Resistant: Aware of the project yet resistant to change.
Neutral: Aware of the project yet neither supportive nor resistant.
Supportive: Aware of the project and supportive of change.
Champion/Leading: Aware of the project and actively drives change.
Teams and Groups
A good team is a collaborative team, which is democratic, in contrast to a terrible team, which is characterized by autocracy.
Extreme Programming Teams: These teams utilize practices like Pair Programming, where one person codes and one checks, or where one writes a test case and another one tests it.
Scrum Teams: A variant of the collaborative team model consisting of a Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Developers. They work in fixed iterations, where the team agrees on how much work needs to be done and signs up for tasks. The customer sees progress at the end of each iteration, and everyone can see what everybody else is doing. Burndown charts are used to track how much work still needs to be done.
Distributed Teams (Virtual team): A team distributed across geographic locations, relying on communication technology. This model can support regional presence, work-from-home arrangements, and access to a wider talent pool. Communication in such teams is less frequent and less rich in visual and behavioral clues, which can introduce cultural or other overheads like time zone differences. However, it can also reduce biases, help communication with local stakeholders, and support a 24-hour work cycle. Visual team activities, such as design, can be particularly challenging.
Teamicide: Factors that can destroy team effectiveness include defensive management, bureaucracy, physical separation, fragmentation of time, quality-reduced products, phony deadlines, and clique control.
Communication Management
Communication Challenges: Challenges can exist at the individual and team level. Individual challenges include semantics, perception, communication channels, feedback, anxiety, and culture. Team challenges include status differences, silos, information overload, and a lack of communication protocol or rules.
Importance of Active Listening: Active listening shows the speaker you are concerned or interested, leads to getting better information, encourages further communication, has the potential to enhance relationships, can calm down someone who is upset, invites others to listen to you, and leads to better cooperation and problem-solving.
Challenges to Listening: These include physiological limitations, inadequate background information, selective memory or expectations, fear of being influenced or persuaded, bias and being judgmental, boredom or interference from emotions, partial listening and distractions, physical barriers like the environment, cultural differences, past experiences, and the use of jargon and acronyms.
Communication Skills and Importance: Skills like conveying your point of view, motivating and influencing others, delegating, recognizing and solving problems, delivering presentations, setting goals, managing conflict, networking, and negotiating are crucial for project managers. Their importance lies in the ability to understand the client, run meetings, communicate thoughts accurately, manage the team, influence the environment, and ensure alignment and buy-in to the project's purpose.
Communication Plan: A document to assist in managing and coordinating key communication messages. A good communication plan ensures communication is effective and efficient, allows the Project Manager to be pro-active, sets a common understanding of what will be done and when, and clarifies who is responsible for key items. A communication plan should detail what information will be communicated, the communication channels, when information will be distributed, who is responsible, the communication needs of stakeholders, the resources allocated for communication, how sensitive information will be handled, the flow of project communications, any constraints, any standard templates to be used, and the escalation process for resolving communication-based issues.
Key Communication Considerations: The importance of face-to-face meetings cannot be understated due to body language. It is crucial that the receiver interprets a message exactly as the sender intended. The choice of communication channel affects communication. Communication conflicts are the single most undermanaged activity in projects.