Agile Project Management

Transcription

1 Agile Project Management UCLA E XTENSION MGMT X C (4 Units) Winter 2011 Introduction to the Course and Syllabus Welcome to the course Agile Project Management. This document provides necessary information to familiarize you with this course: 1. Is this course for you? Page 2 2. Course Outlines Page 3 3. Course Prerequisites and Expectations Page 4 4. Course Grading, Rules, and Instructions Page 5 5. Course Material and Resources Page 8 6. Course Details Page 9 7. Instructor s Introduction Page 13 Please go through this document and get in touch with me if you have a question, a concern, or a comment, or in case you need clarification about an aspect of the course. I shall look forward to working with you in this most exciting and immensely substantial domain in the project management industry! Thank you, Rashed Iqbal, Ph.D. Instructor p.s.: Please review Section 5 of this document before ordering any book for this course Rashed Iqbal Page 1 of 13

2 1. Is this course for you? Today organizations are scrambling to become lean and agile for meeting changing customer needs and expectations, and for efficiently producing high-quality products, services, and solutions. The need to be agile and cost-effective has been intensified further by growing global competition, continuous innovation in technology, and by incredibly short time-to-market requirements. Like any change, the transition to agile is hard and requires not only organizational and personal commitment but also people with knowledge and experience in agile methodologies In the recent years, the job market has registered very strong demand for professionals trained in agile techniques indicating that organizations are becoming serious in agile adoption. Although recent recognition of agile techniques in improving project performance has been based in software development, the methodologies have been successfully applied to a number of domains including media development, high-technology, and information technology, etc. This course teaches you agile tools and techniques for effectively and efficiently undertaking knowledge-based projects of today. Please refer to the sections Course Outlines and Course Details of this document to find more about contents of this course. The following are a few scenarios to help determine if this course is for you: You are a manager with experience in managing projects and/or programs using the traditional approach and you wish to complement your expertise with agile techniques, or you want to transition your teams to agile. This course is also for you if you want to position yourself as a professional familiar with traditional as well as agile methodologies. You are an aspiring leader and are keen to learn agile techniques. This course will not only equip you with the cutting-edge agile methodologies but also provide you an overview of the traditional project management methods to help you decide when and where to apply each. You are a team member (such as a developer, a test engineer, or a content writer). You have heard or read about benefits of agile methodologies, or have some experience of being on an agile team. You want to learn these techniques in depth to improve your performance and/or your team s performance, or you simply want to add the agile learning to your professional portfolio to cater for increasing demand for worker with agile expertise. You are a senior manager and have heard about agile methodologies for improving productivity, time-to-market, and customer satisfaction. This course will help you understand agile methodologies, guide you in transitioning to agile, and introduce you to managing programs using agile techniques Rashed Iqbal Page 2 of 13

3 2. Course Outlines The course is divided into following units: Unit 1 (2 weeks) Traditional Project Lifecycles: This unit will provide you an intensive overview of the traditional project management methods. You will explore project lifecycles based on PMI s PMBOK and IBM s RUP. You will also learn about challenges the traditional project management methods face while dealing with continuously changing scope and other project parameters. Unit 2 (2 weeks) Introduction to Agile Techniques: In this unit you will explore different agile techniques in vogue today with specific focus on SCRUM. You will learn the agile philosophy in addition to reviewing genesis and salient features of SCRUM, DSDM, Extreme Programming and Crystal. Unit 3 (3 weeks) SCRUM Practices and Applications: In this unit, you will learn SCRUM, one of the most popular iterative agile techniques today. SCRUM and its variants have been applied not only in software, but also in a number of other domains. You will explore roles, practices, and applications in SCRUM methodology. You will appreciate why applying SCRUM often works for projects that are changing all the time. You will also learn how SCRUM concepts can be applied to personal time management using the Pomodoro method. Unit 4 (3 weeks) Transitioning to Agile: This has two key foci: transitioning to agile and organizational aspects of the agile implementation. You will learn how teams using the traditional lifecycle techniques are transitioned to agile. You will also learn management of the change that impacts the performing organization before, during, and after transitioning to agile. Unit 5 (2 weeks) Evolving to Kanban: In this unit you will explore Kanban, an evolving lean development technique that is very well suited to ongoing programs, product maintenance, and projectized operations. You will learn Kanban while comparing and contrasting it with SCRUM. You will also study how SCRUM and Kanban together could be applied to management of programs with project and operation components. Unit 0 Project: In addition to the units of learning listed above, the course includes a personal improvement project. Goal of this project will be to train you in using agile techniques in better management of your time and profession. The project will start in the third week and will continue through the last week of the course Rashed Iqbal Page 3 of 13

4 3. Course Prerequisites and Expectations There are no specific prerequisites for the course. Normally, you are expected to have a good know-how of the domain you are managing or intend to manage projects in. For example, good understanding of software and of security is expected for managing projects involving development of security software whether you are using agile techniques or traditional techniques. This course will not teach you the domain knowledge that you might need, but it will teach you agile tools and techniques for undertaking projects. These tools and techniques are normally applicable to a wide variety of domains. The need of a good grasp about your domain is necessary in general, but specifically important for projects involving knowledge-work and knowledge-workers especially when agile techniques are used. Any prior training or experience in project management (either as a project manager, project coordinator or as a team member working on a project), in management of operations, or in general management are also helpful in understanding the content of this course. Here is the key requirement of this course: you are expected to read a lot and write a lot. Thus, you need to be a fast and careful reader and a reasonable writer. Expect to read more than 20 pages per day on the average throughout the course. Writing and conveying your point through formal written communication and through essays are important for any internet based course. Therefore, you are expected to write and convey clearly. Such written communication skills are needed as a leader in any case especially in a world that is being increasingly virtualized. You are expected to have good access to the Internet not only to access the course, but also to find and read supplemental resources and material, and to access online tools Rashed Iqbal Page 4 of 13

5 4. Course Grading, Rules, and Instructions This section provides general rules and grading methods of the course. Time Zone and Weeks: All times including those for deadlines will be specified in US Pacific Time. Week starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. Submission of Assignments: One or more assignments will be due every week. An assignment may be a Discussion Question, an Online Quiz, an Essay, an Analysis, or a Project component. Details of assignments (except quizzes) are provided to students at least one week before the submission deadline. Online quizzes are made available at least 72 hours before their completion deadline. All assignments for each week are due by end of that week that is on Sunday by 11:59 PM Pacific Time. Balancing your Load: Each assignment requires you to read prescribed course material. You may find that some weeks will require more work than others. It is your responsibility to balance your work load to make sure that you are able to do necessary reading, analysis, and writing etc. in order to submit your assignments on time. You will also need to watch for maintenance closure of Blackboard to be able to manage your work accordingly. Late Submission: The following rules will apply to assignments (Essays, Analyses, and Project components only) submitted late: An assignment submitted up to 1 week late after the due date will get 50% credit An assignment submitted up to 2 week late after the due date will get 25% credit An assignment submitted later than 2 weeks after the due date will get 0% and may not be marked. A Quiz or a Discussion Question gets NO credits if they are not completed online by the deadline. If you are unable to complete an assignment due to a qualified emergency situation, the instructor, at his discretion, may allow you to makeup. At maximum two makeup opportunities may be available. Make-up assignment may be different than the assignment not submitted. Plagiarism: You are encouraged to use online resources complete your assignments. However, please do not copy any material from the Web or from another source in your assignments. Your submissions will be assessed using online tools, and any instance of plagiarism in an assignment will result in a zero credit for that assignment. It is good practice to provide a list of references that you used in preparation of an assignment Rashed Iqbal Page 5 of 13

6 Distribution of Points: Following is the summary of grade points for different units of the course (see Section 6 for point breakdown of this summary): Grade Calculation: Notice that maximum total points for the course are 1950 (1800 plus 150 points for the Extra Credit). Depending upon points you obtain out of these 1950 points, a percentage will be calculated with a maximum set at 1800 points. For example, let us assume you have obtained 1650 points for Units 0 to 5 and you have additional 100 points from the extra credit assignment you completed. Your percentage will be calculated using the following formula: (Credit Points + Extra Credit Points) 100 Percentage = 1800 ( ) 100 = = 97.22% 1800 Your letter grade will be assigned based upon that percentage as per the following table: Percentage Letter Grade More than 95%: A+ More than 90% to 95% : A More than 87% to 90% : A- More than 84% to 87% : B+ More than 80% to 84% : B More than 77% to 80% : B- More than 74% to 77% : C+ More than 70% to 74% : C More than 67% to 70% : C- More than 64% to 67% : D+ More than 60% to 64% : D More than 55% to 60% : D- Less or equal to 55% : F Extra Credit: The extra credit assignments fall in Week 6. If you intend to take these assignments, you will need to balance your work load with the other assignments of that week. The extra credit normally requires you to put in extra work and dedication Rashed Iqbal Page 6 of 13

7 Nomenclature of Assignments: Name of each assignment characterizes unit, week, and type of the assignment. For example, U1W2-DQ1 shows that the assignment is for unit 1, falls in week 2, and is a discussion question. Units numbers run from 1 to 5, week numbering is 1 through 12, and type could be a DQ (discussion question), an A (analysis or essay), or a Q (quiz). Submission of Assignments Discussion Questions: Please note the following for all assignments of type Discussion Question: A discussion forum titled after the assignment name (e.g. U1W1-DQ1 - PMBOK) will be available for each assignment. Create your own thread in the relevant discussion forum for posting your assignment (using the Create Thread button on the forum page shown below): For submitting comments to posts of fellow students, reply to the relevant thread they have created (using the Reply button on the thread page as shown below): If you have a question for the instructor regarding this assignment, post in the thread created by the instructor for the assignment using the Reply button. Note that your responses to posts of your fellow students must be added to the BlackBoard website by assignment submission deadlines. Therefore, post your work as soon as possible so that others could respond in time. This is a collective responsibility of all students. In other words, if no assignment is posted by the deadline for others to comment upon, no one would get any point. Submission of Assignments Quizzes: Assignments of type Quiz will be available under the link: Content > Assignments Quizzes on BlackBoard Rashed Iqbal Page 7 of 13

8 5. Course Material and Resources Books and Course Material The course will be based on required books (see below) that you will need to procure in addition to the course material and web links provided by the instructor. The instructor-developed course material and relevant links (when applicable) will be made available a week before the relevant week begins. Thus, the material for Week 3 will be provided by end of Week 2. The course material will be placed on the BlackBoard website under Course Documents in folders arranged according to units and weeks. Required Books 1. Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, Agile Software Development with SCRUM, Prentice-Hall, Mike Cohn, Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum, Addison-Wesley Professional, Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin, Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both Paperback, lulu.com, 2010 [Soft copy of this book is available free online at the following link: ] 4. Deasún Ó Conchúir, Overview of the PMBOK Guide, Springer, 2010 [This resource is available free online at the following link: Guide ] Supplementary Reading (NOT required for the course): 1. Mike Cohn, Agile Estimating and Planning, Ken Schwaber, Agile Project Management with Scrum, Microsoft Professional, Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained, Rashed Iqbal Page 8 of 13

9 6. Course Details (subject to change) The following table provides listing of assignments for the course for each week (please notice that the first week is short, that is, starting on 1/3 and ending on 1/9): Rashed Iqbal Page 9 of 13

10 Each unit of the course is discussed below in some detail: Unit 1: Traditional Project Lifecycles (250 points) Project management is relatively a new discipline. It evolved from a number of fields including construction and engineering. Although some of the tools in project management are in use for over a century, the modern project management is often considered to begin in the 1950s when such techniques as PERT and CPM were developed and used. The initial focus of the discipline was activity sequencing but later cost management, risk management, and other project specific tools became parts of the project management discipline. The PMI (Project Management Institute) was formed in PMI led the way for maturing project management as a discipline in the United States. There are many project management approaches developed over the years. These approaches may appear fundamentally different at the outset but in fact share a sizeable proportion of best practices. The traditional project management approach is probably best represented by the PMI publication A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. RUP (Rational Unified Process) was developed by Rational Software a company that was later acquired by IBM. RUP is an iterativedevelopment process paradigm that has been used extensively in development of software. RUP is characterized by a set of very well-defined processes. Although some would characterize RUP as agile, agile purists do not agree due to fairly heavy process prescription of RUP. This unit aims to familiarize you with the traditional project management as defined by the PMBOK and RUP. Week 1 will focus on the PMBOK. You will study first four chapters of Overview of the PMBOK Guide, Springer, 2010 by Deasún Ó Conchúir (see Section 5 for more details of this resource). These chapters provide a very concise introduction to the philosophy and process paradigm of the traditional project management. In Week 2, we will compare PMBOK and RUP to determine how similar or different these two paradigms are. Unit 2: Introduction to Agile Techniques (250 points) Agile methodologies in general and agile project management in particular evolved partly as reaction to many of the failures of traditional project management methodologies when applied to system development projects with software as a dominant part. Many of these failures however resulted from inappropriate application of the traditional methodologies. For instance, in projects where requirements are known in the beginning, a comprehensive requirement analysis and specification development phase could be undertaken in the beginning. For many projects today, where requirements and priorities evolve progressively and continuously due to dynamic nature of technology, competition, and resource availability, a strictly monolithic phased Rashed Iqbal Page 10 of 13

11 approach does not work. Instead, a lean requirement management process is needed where requirements are developed just-in-time (JIT) to avoid waste of effort in developing requirements that are never implemented or are modified significantly. Similarly, schedule development in dynamically changing projects should also be JIT in shorter iterations instead of creating comprehensive plans for overall duration of a long project. Such long-term schedules are often rendered useless with time as requirements or other parameters of a project evolve. The agile methodologies espouse approaches to deal with continuously evolving projects in addition to promoting ongoing and active collaboration and interaction among stakeholders of the project. The agile methodologies in system development projects have been in use for over two decades although the pace of adoption has flourished in the last 5 years. In this unit, we will briefly review different agile methods. In Week 3, we will study the Agile Manifesto and its salient features. We will also review Extreme Programming and DSDM (Dynamic System Development Method). In Week 4, we will study FDD (Feature Driven Development) and Crystal. We will also take a first look at SCRUM the methodology that is the core subject of this course. This unit will be based upon online resources and instructor-developed media details of which will be provided later. Unit 3: SCRUM Practices and Applications (375 points) SCRUM is one of the most popular agile management methodologies used today. Although the popularity of SCRUM stemmed from its use in software, it has been applied extensively in a large variety of projects including high-technology, content development, film production, and embedded systems. SCRUM is not new. Its roots date back to 1986 when Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka defined a new methodology for improving agility in commercial product development. Takeuchi and Nonaka compared phase overlap and cross-functional team focus of this new methodology to rugby where sometime all players in the team move forward as a single unit (called a scrum) while passing the ball among them. A number of experts from the system development industry including Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna used the concept for system development projects and called it SCRUM (the capital letters probably have been adopted from one of Ken Schwaber s early paper). SCRUM has been used since early 1990 s. Its adoption however accelerated with publishing of the book Agile Software Development with SCRUM that Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle authored in In this unit, our focus will be on learning practices and applications of SCRUM using the book by Schwaber and Beedle together with instructor-developed media. Weeks Rashed Iqbal Page 11 of 13

12 5 and 6 focuses on project structure and sprint/release management in SCRUM. These weeks provide a solid grounding to students enabling them to use SCRUM in their projects. In Week 7, we will review why SCRUM actually works in practice in addition to touching upon some advanced topics in SCRUM implementation. Unit 4: Transitioning to Agile (375 points extra credit points) Now that we have learned what is SCRUM, you would want your team or your organization transition to it. Interestingly, transitioning to agile involves not only learning new concepts and tools but also unlearning some of the deep-rooted practices and habits common in the traditional project management. There are a number of patterns that can be used in transitioning a team or an organization to agile depending upon the situation. In this unit we will learn these patterns and other tools to transitioning to agile (to SCRUM in particular). Please mind that transitioning to agile is not a personal business. Instead this is an organizational undertaking. Regardless of if you are a developer (software programmer, media developer, a systems engineer, script writer etc.) or a manager, you need to maneuver tricky waters while transitioning to agility. We will use the book Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn together with instructor-developed media for this unit. Week 8 covers fundamentals of transitioning to agile. In Week 9, we will discuss individual and personnel issues often encountered in agile transitioning. Week 10 discusses how agile teams can be formed and transitioned. Week 10 also includes an extra credit assignment covering organizational issues inherent in transitioning to agile. Unit 5: From SCRUM to Kanban (250 points) Kanban is a non-centralized lean manufacturing concept popularized in Japanese car manufacturing in the the 20 th century. The concept later spread to different manufacturing industries all around the world. In the recent years, Kanban has been successfully applied to visualization and management of high-technology and software projects. The technique is proving invaluable for multiple projects sharing resources and for projects with very short iterative delivery schedules and in projects where requirements change in a very fast feedback loop. In this unit, we will study the application of Kanban to management of such projects. The resource we use is the book Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both together with instructor-developed media. In Week 11, we will leverage our knowledge of SCRUM to learn Kanban while comparing and contrasting both. Week 12 will review several case studies of application of Kanban methods. Unit 0: Project (300 points) This unit spread throughout duration of the course provides students the opportunity to undertake a personal improvement project using agile methodologies. Details of this will be provided later Rashed Iqbal Page 12 of 13

13 7. Instructor s Introduction rashed_iqbal@yahoo.com Phone: Location: Virtual but physically located in Arcadia, CA Hours: Usually available 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM Pacific Time or over the weekend for a phone call preferably by appointment. Welcome to the Agile Project Management class. I am looking forward to work with you in exploring this fascinating and evolving domain. Let me start by telling you a bit about myself. I started reading for my doctorate in Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK in My supervisor suggested I consider my doctoral work as a large project. The work involved a number of stakeholders including the supervisor, research fellows, the funding agency, and the academic body of the university. Furthermore, the project had a fairly tight schedule, and involved coordination, risk management, and planning in face of uncertainty as the research evolves. Earlier in my career, I worked mostly as an individual contributor in systems engineering and software development. The new way of treating the doctoral work as a project helped shape my career aspiration and goals in project management. I have been involved in the management of projects and programs for over 12 years using traditional as well as agile methodologies. Currently, I am a Program Manager at Teledyne Controls in Thousand Oaks, CA. Although, I am a project and program management professional, I continued teaching part-time throughout my career. I have taught Software Project Management at UCLA Extension since With increasing popularity of agile and lean techniques, the course has evolved over the years and now has been titled Agile Project Management. OPM (Organization Project Management) and using lean and agile in high-tech industry are areas of my research interest. I am a PMP and a CSM. I am also a senior member of the IEEE. As a volunteer, I am the leader of Knowledge Management team of PMI s OPM CoP (Organizational Project Management Community of Practice). I am one of the founding members of this virtual community. Earlier, I contributed as a member of the core team and as lead of the Marketing Team for developing second edition of the PMI OPM3 standard, a project that involved over 1,000 volunteers from around the globe. Please feel free to get in touch if you have a question about an aspect of the course. I look forward to learning together with you all. -Rashed Iqbal Rashed Iqbal Page 13 of 13