Agile Project Management Essentials

Transcript

Agile project management differs from traditional project management approaches in one simple phrase, "Make mistakes faster."

A lot of traditional project management practices assume a perfect plan is put in place and we begin executing on that plan and, if things start to go wrong, we stay with the original plan.

With agile project management, we shorten up the communication and feedback loops.

In our environment at Menlo we shorten it up to a five-day cycle, so at most, we go five days before we have a serious check-in with our clients to see how are we doing. And if we're going off-track, which we always will – hopefully just in small ways – we can correct, we can... we can make those mid-course corrections along the way. And that's really the essence of Agile project management.

From the very beginning of Menlo we wanted to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. And we knew the greatest suffering we were trying to alleviate in the world was the suffering of the people who use the software that our team creates.

We knew we had to take a different approach. We call the people who do this work for us High-Tech Anthropologists. And the people who do this work for us apply the techniques of empathy and compassion – go out into the world, study the users that we're trying to serve in their native environment, learn their workflow, their goals as human beings, their habits, their vocabulary.

They bring that information back into the room, synthesize it down into simple paper-based design that will go back out into the world, and test those hand-drawn designs against typical end users to see how they respond.

And, in this way, using the same iterative and incremental approach we use in our software development practices, refine a design that will actually work for the people we are trying to serve.

A lot of people come to visit Menlo. They work in very traditional organizations. They're coming on tours, they're coming and spending anywhere from two hours to five days with us. And the question at the end of their tours is, "Where do I begin? How do I get started?"

Take a small step, see what happens and then work your way through the process. Use a process of hypothesis, experiment and discovery to move yourself forward into a new way of doing things.

The challenges we face using all of the processes we use at Menlo, including Agile project management, High-Tech Anthropology, the different way we set up our company, our process, our culture... are probably the same challenges that any innovators face.

The world doesn't see you through the lens of possibility, they see you through the lens of, "That isn't the way we used to do things. That isn't the way we're used to doing things." And so, if you're not customary, if you're not doing things the way everybody expects, everyone challenge you every step of the way to explain, "Why do you think this is better? Why do you think this is different? Why do you think there's value in these different approaches you take?"

A customer will come in and say, "Tell me exactly how long things are going to take, tell me exactly how much it's going to cost, and tell me exactly how you're going to get there." And of course we don't have exact answers – actually no one does at the beginning of a project. But our approach is to reveal the mistakes, to reveal the unknown components of a plan as early as possible, and then draw our clients into that process.

What we do is hard work. What most companies do is hard work. If we don't do it together, if we don't practice together as a team and getting to the important goal we're trying to achieve, we're probably never going to get there. We're never going to get as far as we could have had we walked hand-in-hand together. And I think the practices of Agile project management allow us to create a deep partnership with our clients if they're willing.

About Richard Sheridan

To find out more about Richard Sheridan and the Menlo Innovations story, go to menloinnovations.com.