Social media tools appeal to that part of all of us that want and need to connect to other humans like us, – to find groups, clubs, lodges, and communities that we have something in common with and contribute in a meaningful way – even if it’s to just share a story or an insight that is uniquely us.  We all crave a sense of belonging, contribution, enrichment, and fellowship.  That’s why we join churches, gyms, civic and professional organizations, sororities, fraternities, etc.  When we are comfortably established within a circle, we naturally want to reach out and keep up and find out what’s new within our circle and share the thoughts, ideas and events that are important to us.  Social media platforms allow us the ability to do this easily and virtually.  Since we have the same needs on projects – to establish an environment that fosters effective communication and information flow between stakeholders, it would seem that social media tools would be a natural answer.  Why then, is there not more success?

A Brand Science Institute study performed in Europe in August 2010 suggested that most social media projects will fail.  As commented further by Jacob Morgan of Chess Media Group, a management consultancy and strategic advisory firm on social business, this is because clearly defined values are usually not established at the onset of a social strategy for both the customer and the company.  Creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account because it’s “cool” , but not really knowing what you plan to do with it is a recipe for failure.  The project will end up with a presence that has unorganized, uncontrolled, or nonexistent content.   Here are some specific tips for using social media tools on projects:

• First, establish a strategy and purpose for the social media tools chosen.  This could be something such as to promote collaboration and foster active participation in communications – both the sending and receiving of information.
• Establish policies and procedures.  Determine any security barriers:  will external internet platforms be acceptable for use and if so how?    If not, create tools or “characteristics” internally using sharepoint or the intranet.  Define ground rules for usage – what restrictions will be enforced.  How will the tools be moderated, and who will do the moderation?  Document the calendar of publications, or any expectations of how the tools should be used.  Create any templates or forms that will be employed.
• Suggestions for project specific uses of social media tools:
  • Wiki’s – Wiki’s encourage collaboration by team members on project documentation and can be used for any type of project documentation: code, requirements, test cases, design specifications, project management artifacts, or end user help documentation.
  • Blogs – Blogs can be used to allow team members to write articles on progress, challenges, or best practices in their discipline.  Blogs from the project manager could contain the status reports.  Specialty blogs could contain messages from the sponsor.
  • Audio/Video messages – Podcasts (audio messages) and videos can be used for training communications or inspirational messages from the sponsor.  The elements of sound and video add richness to a message and give it more depth and dimension than written text alone.
  • Youtube – Youtube can be used as a repository to research expert presentations on best practices.
  • LinkedIn – Linkedin is a professional virtual networking site, which similar to the use of Youtube can facilitate research.  It supports targeting professionals or organizations by certain search criteria, participating in group discussion threads, posting questions, and recruiting.
  • Twitter – Twitter can be used to post brief updates on project activities available to followers of the account.  Consider the benefits of this as contrasted with more traditional approaches such as emailing a large distribution list or embedding within a long status report.  The account’s historical tweet stream has search capability, hash tags to categorize topics with keywords, and the ability to embed shortened URL’s to point to other web content.  Yammer is a corporate (non public) tool that allows similar functionality if security restrictions do not permit the use of Twitter over the public internet.
  • Facebook – A Facebook page can be set up for the project to post stories about social gatherings of team activities in different locations.  This helps promote bonding between the team members who are not co-located. 

The point is, in order to tap into that natural instinct we all have to reach out to each other and share – which seems to be all too elusive on projects sometimes – we need to incorporate the “F” word.  We need to introduce a little FUN.  The extent to which social media tools are pounded on by our team members outside of work is testament to their appeal, so why not have them work in favor of the project instead of against it?

I just established a war room for the beginning of a new project.  In its simplest terms, a war room is a workspace dedicated to a collocated project team, enabling team members to work together to quickly create a solution to a business problem or address a business opportunity. 

 Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

 This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share. 

 Ground Rules

I hate to start off a fun topic with something as pedestrian as rules, but when you have a group work space, it’s best to begin with a clear understanding of boundaries. 

 In my experience, the biggest issues are usually around non-project discussions in the project work room.  I always have a rule that anyone can stop by the War Room to have a quick discussion with a project resource, but those discussions cannot last longer than 5 minutes.  This is clearly stated in the room on a WAR ROOM RULES poster, and I have a kitchen timer nearby just for that purpose.  It not only protects the other folks in the room from having their space co-opted by a non-project meeting, it actually helps the project resource from continually being pulled back into non-project work that has been reassigned (successfully or not) to someone else. 

 The other way this issue rears its ugly head is in cell-phone conversations.  We have all worked on a team with someone whose spouse or children call every 20 minutes.  I have a rule that there will be no non-project related telephone conversations in the War Room either.  If you need to take a personal call, step out of the room.  If you have a teleconference that is not related to the project, attend from another location.

 Another idea is to post “core work hours” for the project room, during which all resources will be in the room and available.  Not only does this clear the way for collaborative work, it lets resources set the expectations of their managers, peers and customers appropriately. 

 Creature Comforts

I think a War Room ought to be a pleasing place that people are excited to be assigned to.  Food is one of the easiest ways to turn a work session into an “event”.  I always provision my War Rooms with snacks (both healthy and unhealthy) to send the message that “you, and the work we are doing here together, is special, not run of the mill or routine”. 

 I bring in lunch and/or breakfast on deadline days to send the message that the time and attention of the people on the project team is so important to the success of the project that I don’t want them worrying about finding something to eat.

 Don’t forget about other things that contribute to a comfortable work space.  Keep the area clean.  Open a window or bring in air fresheners.  Do what you can to create a temperature that is comfortable to most of the people most of the time, and bring in fans or heaters for people who need them. 

Depending on the people in the room and the work underway, I have played music in the room.  In one of my War Rooms, we worked European business hours for three weeks one December, requiring us to start our work day at 2:00 am every day.  We played Christmas music and had bagels every morning to get the day started. 

 On another project we had a huge, all-hands-on deck “cut and paste” effort to get some data normalized into a giant excel spreadsheet. Because our customer had dropped the ball on it, my team undertook this really low-value but critical task.  The team worried that we wouldn’t be able to stay awake during the 8-12 hours it would take to complete the work.  So, I streamed a Law and Order: SVU marathon through the projector and we ordered pizza for lunch, and everyone talked about how it reminded them of cram sessions they endured in college.  This tedious task turned out to be a team-building effort because we all pitched in and made the best out of a bad situation. 

 Visuals

People are stimulated by graphics and visual representations so you should have some project artifacts on the walls of your War Room.  Not only can these be appealing and information for the people on the team, they can be a great way to share information about the project to the rest of your organization. 

Use the space you have to guide project discussions and underline project information.  A blank wall becomes a living flow chart with painter’s tape for swim lanes and sticky notes for process information.  You can easily make and print calendars and tape them around the room, although I prefer large dry erase calendars that can be used for planning and what-if scenarios. 

Testimonials, customer artifacts (anything with a logo) and company information can be used to keep people focused on the long term goals of the project. 

Then take all that useful visual information and hold a project “Open House”.  Send out invitations and invite people to come in, visit with the team, and see what’s going on in the work room.  Make it a fun event with food (ice cream social, anyone?) and door prizes.  Tying this in with major project milestones can also serve your change management and communications plans as well.   

 Customs

Finally, it’s hard to create traditions, but you can certainly recognize trends that can turn into War Room Customs. 

 For example, I worked with one gentleman who would say “Big brain on so and so” whenever someone had a great idea.  Eventually we would all say it to each other to recognize a good idea – “Big brain on Bob today!”, so I went to a teacher’s supply store and bought a… big brain.   Then when we wanted to recognize someone, we would say “Big brain on Beth” and toss Beth the big brain.

 At another organization, we used the word “sacred cow” quite frequently, so I bought a small, stuffed cow that we would hand around the table when we wanted to challenge someone to think differently about and idea they demonstrated a stubborn loyalty toward.

 These are some of my best practices, and I am eager to hear yours.

Qualitative Analysis: During risk identification, the focus was on quantity – identifying as many as possible.  But not all the risks identified merit action.  The purpose of qualitative assessment is to subjectively declare which ones are the most important ones deserving focused attention.  The term subjective is an important distinction from methods used later during quantitative analysis because the assessment is not measured in any precise way.  During qualitative analysis judgment is used to assess evaluations.  This is done by working through the following steps:

1. For each risk, the impact is assessed according to a standard project scale (declared during project risk planning)
2. For each risk the probability or likelihood of occurrence is assessed between (0.0 and .99)
3. The impact rating is multiplied by the probability to obtain a risk score
4. The risk scores are rank ordered to determine the relative priorities
5. According to predetermined thresholds determined during project risk planning, the risks with scores above those thresholds or the top so many in rank order move on to either quantitative analysis (if done for the project) or risk response planning.

Quantitative Analysis:  Not all projects will warrant quantitative analysis.  This is usually only performed for complex projects, long projects, important or high profile projects.  You should use your best judgment as to whether this is warranted or whether it makes more sense to move directly to risk response planning.   Many organizations that perform this process invest in software tools that perform Monte Carlo simulation when there are continuous probability distribution iterations necessary to calculate the possible impact on project objectives.  However, even without such software, it is still possible to perform quantitative analysis by simply shifting emphasis to numerically and objectively analyzing impact and probability for those risks that advance to this phase, rather than the subjective measurement done in qualitative assessment.  Impacts are declared in precise terms of time and cost such as $10000.00 or 10 days rather than a scale value of .8 for example.  Rather than calculating risk scores, expected monetary value (EMV) is used to calculate the exact cost in both time and money for each risk.  This leads to a contingency reserve, which is a budget set aside for funding risk contingency and fallback plans.  The following are the steps:

1. For each risk, the impact in exact time units is assessed (i.e. days, etc.)
2. For each risk, the impact in cost is assessed (i.e. $)
3. If not already available, for each risk numeric probability (0.0 – .99) declared
4. EMV (Time) = probability X Impact time
5. EMV (Cost) = probability X Impact Cost
6. Contingency Reserve (Time) = SUM ( #4)
7. Contingency Reserve (Cost) = SUM (#5)

This allows a more precise calculation of exactly how much the risks and their management will cost.  In my next article I will discuss risk response planning where we will take a look at how to plan strategies to control risks in order to prevent threats and leverage opportunities.

The discipline of risk has six sub component processes:
• Risk management planning
• Risk identification
• Qualitative assessment
• Quantitative assessment
• Risk response planning
• Risk monitoring and controlling
In this article we talk about the first two – planning and identification. In the remaining articles of the series we will discuss the other processes.

Risk Management Planning:  A risk management plan is a document that declares how the remaining steps of the risk process will be performed. It can be a very simple document prepared for each project from an organizational template that states methods and standards that will be utilized for the project. Important things to include in the risk management plan are:
• Methods/techniques to be used for risk identification. Methods/techniques/tools to be used for quantitative analysis (if this step is done)
• Whether quantitative analysis will even be done for the project.
• Historical records and risk categories to use for risk identification – which project archives to explore.
• Roles and responsibilities – who will be part of the team assigned to identify and manage risks.
• Timing – when risk activities will occur – what meetings, etc.
• Definitions of probability and impact – define a common scale and meaning for qualitative ratings.
• Thresholds and tolerances – define the thresholds for advancement of a risk score to risk response planning and where there are special sensitivities (such as cost or time).
• Reporting formats – risk management reports that will be issued and the format.
• Tracking – how the risk process will be reviewed and audited and how activities will be documented. (e.g. where the risk register lives, etc.)
Risk Identification:  After you’ve put some thought into how you are going to do all your risk activities for the entire project, decided who needs to be involved, and written it down into the risk management plan, it’s time to begin identifying risks and writing them down into a risk register. The first thing to be aware of is that a risk is an uncertain event. A fact is NOT a risk. If you know that a certain key team member will not be available for a critical task, that is not a risk to be dealt with in risk management activities. That is a fact to be dealt with in project scope/time/cost/resource activities. So be sure you understand the difference when you begin identifying risks. Also, although not intuitive from the name, a risk can be either positive or negative – either an opportunity or a threat, so be sure to focus on identifying both. Don’t just focus on preventing threats, but also think about how to take advantage of opportunities like sourcing from a supplier that has a lower cost, or finishing a task sooner than planned, etc. Think about who needs to be included to help you with the risk identification activities. These should be subject matter experts who have expertise in the various disciplines involved. This might require that you even go outside the project team and even include customers and stakeholders up and down the organization and in a wide variety of functions. The goal is for quantity over quality at this point so you don’t want to be too restrictive. If someone says “We might get struck by lightning”, go ahead and capture it. You can assess the probability and prioritize it in the next step of the process. Capture all risks in the risk register. Some techniques for risk identification include:
• Review list if risk categories – either a generic commercially available category list or one tailored for your organization. Better still would be one created from past projects. This should not be done as the first risk id step. This should be done after one or two other steps as a “catch-all” to see if anything was missed. The danger in using this first is that people get a false sense of comfort that the list is a comprehensive list of everything possible and they forget to think about what is not on the list.
• Review historical records from previous projects (if available) that are similar to current project – look at risks that were relevant for those projects that may plague your project.
• Review project documentation – There is a reason risk identification comes after all the other project planning activities. You need the output of those exercises to see what the project entails so you know where there is risk. Review the charter, scope statement, WBS, schedule, budget, requirements, specs, etc. for risk.
• Expert Interviews – talk to key stakeholders, customers, sponsors, or members of senior management as necessary to obtain opinions about risk.
• Brainstorming – perhaps the most popular technique, if done properly this method can generate a lot of risks. Best practice is to have 2 scribes in addition to the facilitator. Try to solicit risks in multiple ways: by the project as a whole, by each activity, and by category. Don’t judge – just collect as many as possible! Group them, then clarify.
In the next article we will discuss how to assess and prioritize the risks once you’ve identified them with the qualitative and quantitative assessment steps.

• The first iteration will almost always be a bust. The team is learning how to estimate their work an entirely new way with relative story points, and assessing how much work can be fit into a preset allotment of time. It is very typical for the team to overshoot and not get all the work done that they carve out for themselves. It usually takes 1 or 2 iterations for the team to gauge their velocity or number of story points they can accomplish in an iteration. Only then should an attempt be made to do any type of release planning so you will know how many iterations it will take to achieve all the functionality desired in the release.
• One of the benefits of agile is the flexibility is offers around scope change between iterations, but the cardinal rule is that once the scope of the iteration or sprint is set, no one disrupts the team. That means no high level stakeholders pulling rank and diverting team members to go work on another project. This is one of the reasons the iterations are kept short – no more than 30 days usually, and sometimes shorter, so that the team comes up for air frequently to entertain changes. An obvious issue with this design is the case where the same team must support bug fixes as well as new feature development. One solution to this is to build into every iteration some buffer stories for unknown bug fixes that can be assigned if critical bugs are logged during the iteration that must be addressed by one of the team members.
• On an agile team there is no traditional command and control model. There is no traditional project manager role. The scrum master has no direct authority; he/she is more a facilitator. The team is self directed and self organizing. The team members assign themselves work from the waiting tasks list. This is a hard one for many managers to swallow. They believe that without a supervisor to crack the whip, the team members will have no motivation to work. Most scrum masters find the opposite is actually true. If anything, they have to coach the team to be less aggressive and not bite off more than they can chew. When held accountable for their own work team members will most often rise to the occasion and try harder to prove their worth and value. Where scrum masters do add value is to coach team members to direct their effort towards completeness of fewer stories rather than near completeness of more stories. The only stories that can be demoed at the end of an iteration are completed stories.
• Agile means fewer artifacts. There is a product backlog containing user stories, iteration backlog, and some burn down charts. Typically that’s it. If there is anything more, it is due to organizational culture requirements. As the engineering progresses and conversation happens between developer and business, validation requirements (which is where typical detailed business specifications would be captured) will be developed and captured as part of the test driven development process – which is where it should be to have any real utility. How often have you really ever looked at those extensive business requirement documents (BRDs) after they’ve been developed? Certainly by the time a new project is launched, they are usually outdated and if they are even archived anywhere, they are usually never looked at again. All that effort wasted. So spending the effort getting the right people talking in the first place and documenting where it needs to be won’t result in a lack of valuable documentation, because all those BRDs were never truly valued much in the first place.

Spend time making sure your management really understands how the new agile team will work with each other and with others in the organization and what is expected of them before you start. They will appreciate the education and it just might keep you from becoming the next Dilbert cartoon.

Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share. 

Ground rules

I hate to start off a fun topic with something as pedestrian as rules, but when you have a group work space, it’s best to begin with a clear understanding of boundaries. 

In my experience, the biggest issues are usually around non-project discussions in the project work room.  I always have a rule that anyone can stop by the War Room to have a quick discussion with a project resource, but those discussions cannot last longer than 10 minutes.  This is clearly stated in the room on a WAR ROOM RULES poster, and I have a kitchen timer nearby just for that purpose.  It not only protects the other folks in the room from having their space co-opted by a non-project meeting, it actually helps the project resource from continually being drug back into non-project work that they has been reassigned (successfully or not) to someone else. 

The other way this issue rears its ugly head is in cell-phone conversations.  We have all worked on a team with someone who’s spouse or children call every 20 minutes.  I have a rule that there will be no non-project related telephone conversations in the War Room either.  If you need to take a personal call, step out of the room.  If you have a teleconference that is not related to the project, attend from another location.

Another idea is to post “core work hours” for the project room, during which all resources will be in the room and available.  Not only does this clear the way for collaborative work, it lets resources set the expectations of their managers, peers and customers appropriately. 

Creature Comforts

I think a War Room ought to be a pleasing place that people are excited to be assigned to.  Food is one of the easiest ways to turn a work session into an “event”.  I always provision my War Rooms with snacks (both healthy and unhealthy) to send the message that “you, and the work we are doing here together, is special, not run of the mill or routine”. 

I bring in lunch and/or breakfast on deadline days to send the message that the time and attention of the people on the project team is so important to the success of the project that I don’t want them worrying about finding something to eat.

Don’t forget about other things that contribute to a comfortable work space.  Keep the area clean.  Open a window or bring in air fresheners.  Do what you can to create a temperature that is comfortable to most of the people most of the time, and bring in fans or heaters for people who need them. 

Depending on the people in the room and the work underway, I have played music in the room.  In one of my War Rooms, we worked European business hours for three weeks one December, requiring us to start our work day at 2:00 am every day.  We played Christmas music and had bagels every morning to get the day started. 

On another project we had a huge, all-hands-on deck “cut and paste” effort to get some data normalized into a giant excel spreadsheet. Because our customer had dropped the ball on it, my team undertook this really low-value but critical task.  The team worried that we wouldn’t be able to stay awake during the 8-12 hours it would take to complete the work.  So, I streamed a Law and Order: SVU marathon through the projector and we ordered pizza for lunch, and everyone talked about how it reminded them of cram sessions they endured in college.  This tedious task turned out to be a team-building effort because we all pitched in and made the best out of a bad situation. 

Visuals

People are stimulated by graphics and visual representations so you should have some project artifacts on the walls of your War Room.  Not only can these be appealing and information for the people on the team, they can be a great way to share information about the project to the rest of your organization. 

Use the space you have to guide project discussions and underline project information.  A blank wall becomes a living flow chart with painter’s tape for swim lanes and sticky notes for process information.  You can easily make and print calendars and tape them around the room, although I prefer large dry erase calendars that can be used for planning and what-if scenarios. 

Testimonials, customer artifacts (anything with a logo) and company information can be used to keep people focused on the long term goals of the project. 

Customs

Finally, it’s hard to create traditions, but you can certainly recognize trends that can turn into War Room Customs. 

For example, I worked with one gentleman who would say “Big brain on so and so” whenever someone had a great idea.  Eventually we would all say it to each other to recognize a good idea – “Big brain on Bob today!”, so I went to a teacher’s supply store and bought a… big brain.   Then when we wanted to recognize someone, we would say “Big brain on Beth” and toss Beth the big brain.

At another organization, we used the word “sacred cow” quite frequently, so I bought a small, stuffed cow that we would hand around the table when we wanted to challenge someone to think differently about and idea they demonstrated a stubborn loyalty toward.

These are some of my best practices, and I am eager to hear yours.

─ Online Poker estimating tool: (Free from Mountain Goat Software: www.planningpoker.com ) when teams are performing relative story point estimates and they are all in the same room, they frequently use poker cards. After discussing the story, each team member chooses the card with the number of points they believe the effort represents and all members hold up their card at the same time, so that no one is effected by anyone else’s vote. When someone is not in the room, this requires a different tool. There is an online version of the physical cards where members select their number and only when all members “playing the game” have made a choice, does the moderator release the selections so that everyone can see the numbers chosen.
─ Livemeeting, Gotomeeting, Webex, or other conferencing tools: tools allowing virtual meeting and presentation of materials or system demoing, remote desktop sharing, etc.
─ Skype, other teleconferencing tools: to allow virtual “face to face” interaction
─ Instant messaging: to allow texting/chatting between team members. There should be team covenants regarding responsiveness to IM, email, phone calls, and other forms of virtual contact in the absence of physical contact.
─ Sharepoint, Google Docs, Basecamp, other collaboration platforms: a strong collaboration platform is needed for storage of notes and design documentation. Team calendars, ground rules, conventions and protocols, time zone information, burn down charts, product backlogs, and other team artifacts can be stored here.

While some thought needs to be given to how to divide work and include remote teams or remote participants of a team, many organizations are successfully utilizing agile methods on virtual teams. As with any project any time, the key is in developing creative and consistent ways to communicate among the separated team members.

Processes:   The primary scrum processes allow for grooming of the product backlog or clarifying the complexity by specifying effort factor (story points), grouping work from the product backlog into work iterations, defining and estimating technical work tasks for the work iterations, and packaging completed outputs of the work iterations into a working release product.  Below is a breakdown of the different scrum processes along with their descriptions and analogous waterfall counterpart.

Meetings:    Since frequent feedback is the hallmark of agile, the scrum meeting are the settings that facilitate some of the above processes, as well as allow for frequent status during the work intervals or sprints, and provide the vehicle for the customer acceptance and process improvement.  Below is a table that describes the major scrum meetings, descriptions and their waterfall counterparts.

 Artifacts:  Artifacts are sparse compared to a typical waterfall methodology. All work “to do” is tracked on the product backlog.  Work “left to go”  is tracked on one of 2 types of burn down charts and are meant to show progress to the organization.  Business requirements will seem sketchy in agile as compared to waterfall since preference is given to conversations amongst members of the team, and verification through acceptance criteria and demonstrations.  Below is a description of scrum artifacts.

 In scrum, relative estimation keeps the estimation process intuitive and non specific.  It’s done in group session with the entire team where everyone “votes” on their number all at once to keep voting independent.  The relative story points assist the product manager in backlog prioritization.  Sprint planning makes up the rest of the planning for a 30 day period.  This is where the detailed task decomposition and hourly estimation occurs.

Once a sprint is planned, work is executed and monitored in the daily standup meetings.  Issues are tracked in the Sprint impediment log.  Progress is displayed to the organization in artifacts such as the sprint and product burn down charts.

At the end of the sprint, the work is verified and accepted or rejected in the sprint demonstration meeting.  Then the sprint processes are reviewed and suggestions for improvement are made in the sprint retrospective, before reprioritizing the product backlog if necessary and beginning a new sprint.

Wikipedia provides a good definition for the syndrome: “The term “analysis paralysis” or “paralysis of analysis” refers to over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation, so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome.”

As project managers, we frequently aren’t the decision maker, but we depend on said decision-makers to conduct their business in a timely fashion so our project timelines, scope and budget are not adversely affected. 

I bet every one of us can recall a project or three where the right decision at the wrong time had a much worse affect on the project than the wrong decision, made in a timely fashion, would have had.

So, how do you help the wayward decision maker who is wringing his or her hands?    

Here are a few things I’ve picked up in the trenches, and am eager to hear your best practices on this topic.

1. Don’t pressure the decision maker.  People who are having trouble making a decision usually feel that they are under a tremendous amount of pressure, whether it is real or imagined.  If you contribute to that by increasing the pressure, real or imagined, they may dig in their heels.
2. Paint the picture with the project plan.  Use the artifacts of your work to show the effects of indecision on the project time line.  You don’t need to beat them over the head with it, just let the Gantt do the talking. 
3. Put a deadline on the decision-making process.  Allow time for deliberating and create a milestone for the “Decision Made” task.  This shows you support the time it takes to make a decision, but that it is a time-bound activity, like virtually everything else on the project plan. 
4. Defend the decision.  I’m not suggesting that as the project progresses you blindly support every decision that was made; I’m suggesting that you defend the position that a decision was made throughout the arm-chair quarterbacking that occurs during the project.  Remind everyone that a decision had to be made and you support that it was, for better or for worse.   

I first became interested in agile when I was leading technology teams and consistently struggled with the standard waterfall challenge of getting accurate, complete, well understand and well documented business requirements for long software development application projects.  Once we felt like we finally got things “nailed down” and began design and development work, requirements would change before we could deliver the first release.  The agile methodology is a natural solution for this.  I began my own course of self study, networking and training, and eventually acquired a scrum master certification.

To understand the principles of any of the flavors of agile methodology (and there are several), you need to first understand the agile manifesto, developed by the original set of agile founders:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Scrum happens to be one of the most popular types of agile and derives its name from a daily standup meeting called the scrum meeting, involving the team and the facilitator who is called the scrum master.  Below is a discussion which breaks down some of the important roles used in scrum and compares them to their analogous counterpart in a waterfall methodology. 

Roles – there are only 3 officially recognized roles on an agile scrum team:

• Product Owner – The product owner is a member of the scrum team and is responsible for what the team builds and for optimizing the value of it.  He/she owns decisions and risks regarding what business stakeholders want.  He/she defines the features to be produced and decides on release date and content, and determines feature priorities.  He/she can change features and priority between sprints.  He/she negotiates acceptance criteria for work results with rest of team
• Scrum Master – facilitates process and keeps things moving.  He/she manages the internal dynamics of the team including the relationship of the product owner with the rest of the team.  He/she enforces the scrum framework.  He/she ensures full team involvement in all meetings and keeps everything visible, including “radiating” information to the larger organization.  He/she shields the team from external interference.  He/she advocates improved practices.  Very important:  He/she facilitates, but does not manage.  The scrum master has no official authority over the team.  He/she cannot assign work to the team.
• Team – This is a small (7 +-2 member) cross functional group who are responsible for the work they agree to take on during the work period called a sprint.  They are a self organizing unit – meaning they assign sprint work tasks to themselves.  They negotiate the work of the sprint with the product owner.  Along with the product owner, they demo the work results to the stakeholders.

The product owner is analogous to a business analyst, product manager or sponsor in a waterfall methodology, and the team is similar to any team anywhere, with the exception of the self organizing part.  That’s a little loose-y goose-y for a lot of management teams to get used to.  Frankly, what I’ve seen in a lot of companies I’ve networked with is a gradual approach to this, because as much as this sounds like a great goal, in companies that have been highly command and control, teams have to get as used to it as the managers themselves do.  The scrum master could be similar to a technical team lead or a technical project manager in some organizations.  What is strikingly missing in this model is the overall project manager him/herself.  The traditional, all controlling, project manager doesn’t really have a direct correlation.  To find a home in an agile practicing organization the PMI style project manager has to make some decisions.  For individuals with a more product oriented, business slant, the product owner might be a great role to assume.  For the more technically minded, the scrum master role might be a better fit.

One of the most intriguing differences between agile and waterfall and what in my mind makes agile so compelling is in the area of scope control.  In the waterfall methodology we go to great lengths to define the scope of the project in as much detail as we can all up front, and then protect that scope.  We define a rigid scope change process which acts as a deterrent to anyone who wants to introduce changes to the work that we already have a complex tangle of design plans around, because of the cost and pain of implementation when you work on everything all at once.  With agile the notion of scope control is virtually non-existent, except within the context of the short periods of work, called sprints.  This is by design.  This is to allow and even encourage the product owner to be flexible and change their mind in between sprints as the business sees the results of work and reacts to it; and as events in the business change. 

In a nutshell, product features and all other work are maintained in a document called the product backlog, in single threaded priority by the product owner.  The team determines “chunks” of that work off the top that they can perform in time boxed periods of work called sprints (usually 30 days).  Once a sprint starts, the scrum master insures that the scope of the sprint does not change.  At the end of the sprint the team and the product owner jointly demo the work that has been completed to the business stakeholders.  The product backlog is reprioritized if necessary by the product owner and another sprint is started.  Sprints are repeated until enough work is completed to comprise a release.  Sounds simple huh?  Well there’s a little more to it than that.

In my next article I will discuss the small set of artifacts, meetings and processes involved and discuss what they compare to in a waterfall context.