Software Development and Project Management 2.0
Project Management is the discipline of planning, organising and managing ressources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. A project team works together to achieve one collective goal. Activities have to be coordinated and the classical way of coordination is hierarchy. A project leader is responsible for the project result, quality and time management. Teamleads and team members are executing assigned tasks.
Software development projects are usually very complex. This complexity requires that specialists work collaboratively together with two main consequences for the conventional project management and hierachical structures:
1. The project leader may not be able to assess project tasks as this would require more special expertise.
2. The project leader may not be able to assign tasks as he may only know WHAT has to be done but may not know HOW a task has to be done. The project team, consisting of specialists, should divide and assign tasks as they are better aware of the strengths of each team member.
Furthermore is hierarchy in software development to some extend outmoded, inflexible and static. Unmotivated employees and frustration impede creativity and flexibility.
What is project management 2.0 and what are the benefits?
Similar to the principles of Enterprise 2.0, new agile software development methods require a rethinking of classical structures and is defined by the following elements:
1. Self organisation of project teams
2. Team work and collaboration
3. Transparency of intermediate results
4. Decentralisation of coordination
A good and emerging example of (social) agile software development is SCRUM. SCRUM is an agile software development framework and has emerged as the most successful agile development process for organizations, developers and executives alike and is used by more than 500 companies worldwide. Work is structured in cycles of work called sprints, iterations of work that are typically two to four weeks in duration.
Scrum process
During each sprint, teams pull from a prioritized list of customer requirements, called user stories, so that the features that are developed first are of the highest value to the customer. At the end of each sprint, a potentially shippable product is delivered.
SCRUM has three roles, the SCRUM Master, the product owner and the team. The team organises itself. No project manager is needed anymore, as the team is responsible to achieve project goals collaboratively. Thus, tasks have to be assigned and finished by the responsible team member. This requires appropriate collaboration tools to support the team to be up to date, to collaborate and to share knowledge.
The SRUM for you blog has a list of SCRUM tools available, updated regularly.
Scrumy is web based and provides the basis version for free. The tool is very easy to use, contains a backlog and user stories can be moved from one sprint to the next. Scrumy posts program updates regularly on Twitter and has a company blog.
SpiraPlan is a complete Agile Project Management System in one package, that manages project’s requirements, releases, iterations, tasks and bugs/issues. In addition, SpiraPlan provides reporting dashboards of key project progress and risk indicators – task progress, effort slippage, project velocity, task burndown/burnup, top risk and issues – in one consolidated view. Since it is web based, teams can collaborate in real time had have up to the minute visibility of the project status. The web application provides the complete picture of a project accessible for all stakeholders and has an integrated documentation management. Tasks can be allocated and estimated and the dashboard contains all key information.
Screen SpiraPlan
There are much more interesting SCRUM tools and SCRUM for you has evaluated many of them. The descriptions available can provide good support for finding the right software for SCRUM projects.
