Strategies, Benefit and Alignment HT2019

Hi everyone, in this blogpost I want to reflect on my experience as a developer in handling risk on agile development. Types of risk: Let's start by identifying the typical types of risks that appear during an agile development. Going over the budget. Personnel Risk. People falling sick or leaving the project. Knowledge Risk. Problems with knowledge transfer, lack of people with experience in a specific topic, etc. Productivity Risk. Specially if the goals are long term. Time Risk. To adapt to the project requirements and avoid delays. My propose solutions Based on my experience as a developer, these are my personal solutions to the identified problems: Budget: The provision of the budget should be included with each sprint. In this way, the costs will come on demand, and their impact on the project will be more impactful and measurable. Personnel, Knowledge Risks: A good way of tackling both problems will be to create small subteams, in which senior people is ...

Hi all ! In this blogpost I want to write about the differences between the two more use frameworks for project management. Definitions Waterfall is a linear approach to project management. In this methodology, there is a linear sequence of events. In a Waterfall project, each of these represents a distinct stage. Each stage generally finishes before the next one can begin. There is also typically a stage gate between each; for example, requirements must be reviewed and approved by the customer before design can begin. Agile is an iterative, team-based approach to development. Rather than creating tasks and schedules, all time is organised into phases called sprints. Each sprint has a defined duration with a running list of deliverables, planned at the start of the sprint. Deliverables are prioritised by business value as determined by the customer. If all planned work for the sprint cannot be completed, work is reprioritised and the information is used for future sprint pl...

Thinking about media production and ways of developing technologies that underlie social media content and services, personally for me, is impossible not to remember so called media father Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan (1967) claimed that media is an extension of every human being, each medium is a “massage” to our entire body: "they [media] are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered"(McLuhan & Fiore, 1967, p. 26). Media enables accessibility to the uncountable amount of resources; naturally, such a vast amount of resources cannot be distributed evenly in the society and in each of our lives.Nowadays, when the Internet is soFigure 1. Filter Bubble (Backchannel, 2017).complex and multi-layered, social inequality arises in the way that not everyone recognises the pattern, how algorithms work or simply just do not realise what is hiding ...

Hi everyone, today I want to talk about the difference between Kanban and Scrum. I wanted to to some research because they are the two most famous agile frameworks, and they are often confused one with the other. A really good starting point can be found here , where this table is presented: As can be seen in the table, Kanban is more focused on continuous delivery, whereas Scrum is more focused on the team structure. They core idea in Scrum is to structure the team in such a way that it can deliver changes at a constant speed (each sprint there is a backlog to complete) and the key metric is velocity. On the other hand, Kanban does not structure the team in any specific way, but it rather enables the team to be continuously producing and at the same time changes and the status of the work can be consulted at any point in time, giving it extra flexibility. This exposes the big difference between the two methods. Scrum aligns more with the classical way project manag...

Hi everyone, Today I want to talk about team effectiveness. I think it is a really important topic that has a high impact on the outcome of a project. In this blogpost, I would like to introduce several models for team effectiveness that I have found, but first let's introduce the concept itself. What is team effectiveness ? Team effectiveness is also known as group effectiveness. It consist on the capacity of a team to accomplish goals or objectives. One important aspect is that the tasks of the individuals are interdependent and the responsibility of the output is shared among all the members. Different models Several models to increase team effectiveness has been proposed. A summary of some of the most important ones are: Rubin, Plovnick, and Fry's model It is also known as the GRPI model to stand for goals, roles, processes, and interpersonal relationships, and is represented in a diagram as a pyramid in which each of the levels need to be met by the t...

Hi everyone, today I want to touch into the topic of portfolio risk management. What is portfolio risk management ? As defined in the PMI book, a project risk as “an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or a negative effect on a project's objective.” Therefore, risk management is performed “to increase the probability and impact of positive events, and decrease the probability and impact of negative events in the project”. The same ideas are applied to portfolios. In the portfolio level, there are 3 types of risks: Component risks , which constitute the risks of individual components in a portfolio (i.e., projects, programs, etc). Structural risks , associated with the way in which the portfolio is composed and the potential interactions among the components . Overall risks , which result from the interaction between component risks that can lead to the emergence of one or more overall risks and the quality of the portfolio itself. 3 strategi...

Hi everyone, following up my blog post from the last week, I would like to conclude what I've learnt about the leadership in intercultural componies and what are the opportunities and challenges that I take with myself for my own future leadership roles. Firstly, I think it is very important to understand that followers are the most important in any management situation. However, talking about followers we also have to talk about leaders and leadership itself. I think that best leaders are those that have the purpose of why they do their work and those who in parallel know how to do it. By this I mean, that leader must observe his followers, as his leadership very much so depends on them. Furthermore, I believe that every leader, especially in this case, should understand that culture, organization and each individual that he is working with is dynamic and always in flux, which means that they all are changing all the time and affected by the inside and outside influences. Th...

Hi everyone! The course is getting up to the speed and I feel like I have been learning a lot of new things, listening to interesting podcasts and really enjoying reading some of your blog posts. At work it has been also a roller coaster of ups and downs. As for me the IT world is very new I'm happy to learn new things about project management and project planning. One topic that crossed my mind recently was how do teams in IT deal with project delays? How do they keep the team motivated? What are the pitfalls of a delayed project? And of course, how to handle it? I was reading around on this topic and here I will summarize what are the key factors for managing deadlines: -Evaluation of the requirements One of the most important factors on being productive is having a structured workflow. Evaluating requirements and estimating the time that similar tasks took in the past makes it easier to set realistic deadline for the project. -Getting the resources the team nee...

Hi everyone, in this blog post I want to write about how DevOps impacts project management. Nowadays, in the IT industry the role of self-organising teams is the new de-facto standard. With frameworks like Scrum or Kanban, IT teams rely less on project managers than before. In this context, DevOps has to come to increase the speed at which this teams release features and at the same time, how the quality is increased. DevOps is able to guarantee these goals, thanks to ideas like continuous integration, containerisation or measurements. This has highly impact the role of project managers, as their goal is to organise the team to achieve a goal on time and with a given quality. On these lines, I found an idea that I want to share on my blog. The idea is that the role of the project manager has changed, not as the person who coordinates the rest, but to be one in a team characterised to be flat, more looking to an assembly line than a pyramid. This is shown in the flowing diagram: ...

Hi everyone, those you have read this blog probably know that I work as a developer in one of the telecommunications companies here in Stockholm. At the moment we are facing some challenges that I thought it would be interesting to share with you and hear your own experiences and hopefully even examples on how to overcome such challenges. Some of the biggest challenges we face are as follows: Unclear Goals. The project I am working on at the moment is creation of the new app for the company that would in the future replace the existing one. However, from the very beginning the product owner hasn't been clear on what we should focus the most: creating and MVP? releasing the new product as soon as possible? focusing on building a beta? Not having a clear goal or a clear vision within the team has slowed down the project significantly. Inadequate Communication. A success of every project is closely related to how well the team communicates within and outside the team with...

Hi everyone, Since reading this course that is closely related to project management, my thoughts are wandering about the leadership as well. For me, personally, leadership and management go hand in hand together. Recently I read couple of books: A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership (Jackson & Perry, 2011). Leadership in Organizations (Yukl, 2013). Both books talked about the leadership in big, mostly intercultural organizations. In my opinion, the role of the team leader who has to manage the team that are located in different parts of the world and have members from different cultures is complex and severe. First thing first, I think what is important for every manager, especially in big organisations, is to understand that his job is to establish the balance between the concern of the team members and the productive manufacturing process. As Jackson & Perry (2011) highlights – “most effective leaders will achi...

Today I have been thinking about one of the dilemmas most projects face: quantifying the work and estimation. Even an experienced project manager or team leader can never be sure to make the estimations correctly. Reasons for that are many: there might be different people each time, or different teams within the project, there might be different requirements, different business context, different technologies and of course different priorities, responsibilities, goals. Recently, at my work we started a new project and this is how we made our estimations: We tried to size the project relatively. This new project that we took up to realise was a remake of the old companies website. Having the information about how long that first project (old website) took, how many people were working and how many we have now we could estimate how long the new project would take. It's hard to estimate without having some kind of comparison point, thus estimating comparing to some similar proj...

In today's blog post I want to reflect on value management. Let's start with some definitions and goals. What is value ? Value is a common day-to-day concept. But it is hard to define it. The two main ways of defining value are: The importance, worth, merit, or usefulness of something. A principle or a behaviour standard. For example, honesty and generosity are valued in people. So value definition has an economic aspect (that drives the exchanges in markets) and also a moral aspect ( what is seen as good and just, has more value). What is value management and it's goals ? Value management is the process of delivering some benefit to a client. When we talk about project implementation, delivery of expected results and organization of activities, value management defines the benefits that are derived to the customer from the successful implementation of a given project. When the project brings some value, it is worth implementing and can be qualified i...

I am own opinion, this statement carries both a deep truth and a false statement depending on the point of view of the person who reads it. If this statement is taking into consideration from a theoretical point of view, it is false. It would be trivial for anyone to construct a theoretical case in which project management will not only help but be vital for the project success. And it is true, project management as a discipline has been created out of the need of organising and measure, resources and progress to achieve goals. But this point of view disregards the practicalities and common situations that normally arises during the execution of a IT project. In my working experience, it is not uncommon when a project manager simply confuses a team more than it helps, because he or she does not have experience with the technology that is being created in the project. It is hard to manage a process that you don't understand. his is typically true when it comes to IT and soft...

Another topic related to digital transformation that got me thinking is the appearance of the topic Online Persona. In recent ten or so years it became more and more important to have "appealing" online persona. It's important when applying for jobs, when looking for new business partners, applying for universities and overall, forming the image you want everyone around you to see. Online persona or in other term Internet identity (IID) is considered as an actively/intentionally built identity via online resources: internet forums online chats online multiplayer games social networks social media avatars pictures I think it's true that digital world nowadays is a place where you not only sell products, services, ideas but a place where in the way you sell yourself as well. As the saying goes, every coin has two sides, therefore, the online identity is also has both negative and positive sides. On one hand it allows you to draw a line between social a...

I was surfing the Internet the other day when I came across a blog post that talked about challenges on digital transformation. I think it is was very interesting so I would like to reflect on it. I would like to start with a concise summary of the main points presented on the blog post. In the article, 5 challenges are identified: Challenge #1: The Changing Customer Experience. It presents how customers experiences should we built from the bottom up, by the use of customer journeys. It should be iterate on a daily basis and optimise. All to generate more retention. Challenge #2: Employee Pushback How digital transformation can affect the culture and structure of a business, and how this will affect the workforce. Challenge #3: Omni channel Adaptation How all available channels, like traditional sales people and more modern websites and social media platforms, should be used for capturing more clients. Challenge #4: Failing or Poor Analytics One of the more imp...

Without doubt out working life is changing and will be completely transformed together with a new era of digitalisation and digital transformation. I found an interesting article "Technology, jobs and the future of work" (McKinsey & Company, 2019) that got me thinking about how our jobs will look like in the future. McKinsey and Company have done and extensive research on over 2,000 work related tasks and quantified the accessibility to automate them. The outcome of this research was that many jobs that we are doing to this day has a high potential to be automated. "The impact will be felt not just by factory workers and clerks but also by landscape gardeners and dental lab technicians, fashion designers, insurance sales representatives, and even CEOs." The research also found that more than half of all work occupations have at least a third of activities that can be automated, which means that most of the current occupations will change and more people...

Nowadays Digital Transformation is associated with innovation, technology and new production processes such as IoT, learning and AI. No doubt these phenomenas are the enablers of the digital transformation, however, while many management consultants would advice to invest in new technologies for business growth and development, I would say that it's people that businesses need to invest. In my opinion, people are the main drivers of digital transformation. First, in many ways people can connect with other people better than machines currently can as well as people are still an important part of machines work meaning that it hard to find technology that functions purely without needing human's interaction. Secondly, people posses critical thinking. Even though computers are able to process way more data than humans, a person is still needed to maximise the benefit of AI and Machine Learning. And thirdly, people have talents, which means that they are unique and can benefit t...

My name is Vilda and I am starting this blog as an assignment for a course Benefits, Strategies and Alignment, which is part of the Master’s in Project Management in IT at Stockholm University. Currently I am Full stack web developer, working in a corporation that focuses on providing telecommunication services. Having previous experience from entrepreneurial ventures and now, working at a corporate company, I am striving to learn more about management in IT — strategies, processes, alignment within the teams et cetera. Agile, scrum, kanban, lean, strategic… are keywords that most of us, who are at least a little bit involved with the IT world know and hear on a daily basis. My interest lies in understanding these managerial strategies on a deeper level, learning how to adapt them in both working environment and in a daily life. With a great excitement looking forward to filling in this blog as the course follows, learning about how to be efficient in organising IT pro...