Making change happen

A 1 day CIMA course in Crawley

Agenda

My mind maps of the useful points from the speeches (note there are multiple tabs) - open access but it may be necessary to set up a free Lucid Charts account.

Handouts (access to this is restricted due to copyright).

Process Excellence

Mindmap from Process Excellence BPP online course 2 Sep 16.  Note there are multiple tabs, one includes into to 6 Sigma.

Using Rally to track progress in Agile Scrum projects

Received training from Ernst and Young and I spent my first few days using Rally. Rally is a productivity tool specifically designed for teams delivering projects using the agile methodology. It seems excellent for taking a user story and allowing team members to add tasks to it.  The tasks each have an expected time to complete, which can be easily updated and directly feeds burn down charts both for the whole project and for the individual.

This looks as if it will be a very useful tool for capacity planning, understanding current progress and helping team members to continue to motivate themselves.

Agile scrum training

With one of my projects now moving out of the inception phase and into its first sprint, my team has had some additional training from Ernst and Young. Up until now, we have been working on user stories which are details of user requirements and how to test them. Now we have identified the first user stories that we are going to deliver and each member of the team is now defining their own tasks to help deliver those stories. This is being tracked using Rally (see separate post).

A (good) picture is worth a thousand words

Immersed in world of projects, it has been great to see so many other people explaining the world with diagrams and flow charts.  It looks like my much used www.mindmeister.com may be replaced with Visio for a while.  Skimmed through a 47 page document on Business Process Modelling Notation (private link here due to copyright).

Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube

Inception phase begun for project.  Had a day of start up and explanation with Ernst & Young (EY) including this short intro to Agile.  It is not in any way officially endorsed by EY.  Apparently there is some advertising blurb at the end but the beginning is a concise and useful quick run through.

NEW Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube:

Scrum reference card

This article is an introduction to the scrum way of working. The scrum is a self organising cross departmental team to deliver a project in a series of sprints. Each sprint delivers a version of the project which can be seen to be working, and although initially greatly simplified, is more complex than the previous version. This aims to avoid the risk of a project that gradually becomes more and more delayed and bogged down with unresolved problems until it fails.

Lean, Scrums and Projects

Spent first full day with a client's project team working with Scrum and Lean methodologies.  Seem to be some good ideas for tracking ideas through, maintaining drive and keeping strong communication with other teams.

This site (which I have not yet studied in detail) seems to have outlines of the principles with some video training materials.

Project Management novel

Rocks Into Gold by Clark Ching is a similar idea to the excellent series of books by Goldratt where you read a fun fictional story and follow a character learning about something useful.  Goldratt's books are about the Theory of Contraints, this book by Ching is saving a company from collapse by restructuring a project in order that parts can be delivered earlier improving cash flow.  You don't have to be an accountant to appreciate it.  There is certainly a gap in the market for more books using this technique of combining fiction with learning.

Agile Project Management - brief book review

Agile Project Management For Busy Managers by Tony Riches

A succinct readable book introducing Agile Project Management.  In a nutshell, seems to say don't spend ages specing everything out in minute detail because things will change.  Identify easy wins and deliver minimum first followed by more.  This seems to tie in with the 'minimum viable product' ideas from lean manufacture.

Lessons from Terminal 5 project

Attended interesting talk by Dr Tim Brady of the Centre of Innovation Management at the University of Brighton.

Key points about Terminal 5 project:

• Massive project (biggest in Europe at the time)
• Set up in multidisciplinary groups to encourage innovation rather than blaming other areas
• Delivered on time and budget - a major achievement for such a project
• First week was then a disaster
• Key lessons: you cannot test for everything so build in some slack (at T5, they were so confident that they started off at almost full capacity.  Some staff and passengers could not find car parks so were late, some staff could not then log on to systems as some test data left in - as little spare capacity, minor problems then caused major problems).

Much more about this project is available here.

Key general points

Project risk can be broken down into 3 main types:

Structural risk:

It's a big project - risk reduced by good planning and control.

Socio-political risk:

It has people involved - stakeholder relationships become very important to manage expectations and keep people working together rather than 'blame shifting'.

Emerging Complexity:

The unknown unknown.  This can be reduced by sharing information eg using web to have single master plan rather than some people working on out of date paper plans.  Need to be aware of this risk and have people looking for problems with capacity (resource and time)  built in to deal with problems.

Project Management Masterclass

Professional Body Cross Sector Networking Event.  Included presentation by Nick Lake, former Director of the UK Project Management Institute (good speaker, worth seeing again).  Intro by Laura Dziaszyk of CMI (poor speaker, avoid if she is main speaker).

Joint event with CIMA, Brighton Business School, ACCA, CIM, CIPD, CII, IFA, CMI and IOD.

Points to follow up:

1. Cost/benefits of formal project mngt qualification such as Prince2.
2. The grief cycle (but with applications to many other 'people issues').
3. Motivating Volunteers by Helen Little (because most people working in projects, or with interims, are not direct reports and need to be motivated as if they are volunteers.

Network notes:

First met: People from HMRC, Sussex Police (90 day consultation), someone ex PWC just back from Thailand.

Renewed contacts with Adam Shields, Michael Ramshaw and Judith Newton. 

2 hours for CPD purposes.