How have you innovated software project management?

Not going by the books. Having an agile mindset is definitely beneficial most of the times but one must be very careful in applying Scrum. It doesn't work in all the places specially when you have fixed scope and time with less opportunity to innovate. Agile methodologies do not guarantee that you will always respond to change, manage risks and collaborate better. A self driven team working towards a vision with good clarity of WHY behind the work is the key. So a project leader must always focus on the opportunities to lead their team towards it. So thrive towards building a true agile team, once you have that outcomes will come with balanced adoption of agile methodologies.

As per my experience, everyone gets ideas but only few people would be successful in converting idea to a product. Multiple factors would play a role in this - Ability to successfully articulate and present an idea to the leadership team - Provide proper metrics - such as Benefits? ROI? Revenue increase or profits or productivity etc. - Make sure you present at the right time and right forum especially when leaders are looking for ideas and ready to support. - Make sure your ideas align to the department goals. - Do not pursue idea as yours. Wherever possible, collaborate with other teams and be ready to release it to corporate systems in case if accepted rather than holding it with you for implementation.

While Agile methodologies have become mainstream, its been at the forefront of refining & customizing Agile practices to suit specific project needs. This includes incorporating elements from various Agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban & Lean, while also adapting them to fit the unique requirements of each project & team.

Agile methodology is useful to deliver results iteratively where we develop, build and deploy faster, continuously integrating the learnings from prior steps. Key things to keep in mind: - Design scalable solutions - Break down into small buildable deliverables e.g MVP and post- MVP - Have a continuous feedback loop to seek feedback, integrate, measure and improve - Collaboration between business, design, product and tech is critical

Its one of the greatest things in modern software development. DevOps makes the developers life easy. Example of DevOps is, A costume designer focus on his core areas such as designing, cutting, fitting and material quality instead of his non-core areas ironing, packaging and sealing. You collaborate with others but have key focus on your core. DevOps makes the infrastructure setup, deployment, security, quality, monitoring, traces, logs more easier.

DevOps is directly proportional to productivity improvement for the team! When you automate the mundane repeated tasks for the team then you get to spend that time in various innovation! Team do not have to baby sit their coding deployments rather all the work happens in the background when we all sleep~!

DevOps heavily relies on automation which requires huge shift in responsibilities from operational tasks to be automated by developers with scripts. DevOps does not necessarily increase the responsibility of the developers to write automation scripts, but it would increase the need of operations people to become more like developers by writing and testing those scripts. This unique need of DevOps practice creates a new kind of software engineer (DevOps Engineer) that has broader skills then just traditional core development. Those include infrastructure as a code and security as a code knowledge and skills.

Devops is an important practive to achieve the continuation of systems. It helps to improve productivity and value with limited resources.

It also offers robust Disaster recovery feature which help during disruptions . We do not need any additional overhead of maintaining the physical DR site . Cloud based disaster recovery enables quick restore of data and minimizes the downtime and business disruptions .

Cloud computing can become cumbersome and costly if not done correctly. DevOps practice becomes a pre-requisite to some extend if you wish to successful design and run cloud solutions where truly you can instantiate and use cloud resources on demand and only during the short lifecycle needed to fulfil their function. The idea of serverless computing in the cloud gives you exactly this benefit, to focus on writing the code and fulfilling business functions rather than worrying on dependent infrastructure, network or computing power need for your code to run.

Cloud computing helps systems to be available 24*7 with less infrastructure cost for small organizagtions and many geocetric avalablities helps in fast availability.

We're currently developing a project management suite that incorporates LLM-based models to revolutionize how we handle artefact creation and maintenance. By leveraging AI's capabilities in reasoning and decision-making, we aim to automate critical aspects of project management like planning and risk analysis. This not only streamlines operations but also enhances accuracy, minimizing human error and biases. We're excited about the potential of this initiative to significantly up our game in project efficiency and innovation.

Improving Project Management practices and helping Project Managers in their day to day activities is a very good use case for AI. The implementation can be either by providing a customized GPT that is trained on Project Management knowledge to provide expert answers or GenAI tools that can help PMs automate certain activities.

You must bear in mind that behind building your own AI solution there is always huge task of training the AI with large (huge) data set to make it efficient. Using AI is the easy part now-a-days, however training AI with your own data and models is unfortunately something that most companies would not even entertain to think about, at least not yet.

Incorporate AI-driven solutions to optimize resource allocation, predict project risks, and provide actionable insights. AI can analyze historical data and current project metrics to make proactive recommendations.

Artifical intelligence is the key technology for next decade though it seems kiggling jobs in some tech trends but in evolving era it helps people a lot.

Always keep the user as focal point! We all start with asking what user needs, but one the best way to validate what user needs is through some of the methodology in user centric design like contextual enquiry. This means sit down with user and see what they are doing the problems they are facing and the hurdles they have to go through to do their daily work. Observe and learn is an interesting topic I always recommend first to understand the problem rather than jumping into solving the issues the user listed in a paper!

User cetric design always makes system more interactive to audience. Devloping userfirendly websites is key to this always make user to just navigate to three pages to collect information anlso if user want any information make the availablity of ingormation with in 3 clicks.

One of the tools that I use a lot is Miro. I use it for planning, retrospectives, brainstorming and any meeting that requires remote collaboration. Coming from a project management background, a key component of my toolbox is the plan on a page. I have one in Miro with a column for each sprint over the financial year. At a glance, I can see our roadmap - where we came from, where we are, and where we are going. And changes in direction/plans are so easy to make in Miro. This has become a living roadmap that my team and I keep updated. The key to making it work is to get buy-in from your team, especially from your Product Owner and senior stakeholders. They would also appreciate the simplified view of the team's plan on a page!

Collaboration over documentation (but not without) should be key driving factor to success. Individual or even cross functional teams function best when they work closely together and discuss and document as needed, are proactive and not reactive and embrace the change instead of being afraid of it. Discussing how you will deliver you software project should not be less important than the project outcome itself.

In project management, I always push for this 'innovative' idea: listen to your engineers! You hire them for their expertise, so listen to what they have to say. It should be common sense, but it's surprising how often the company decision makers do just the opposite, to their extreme detriment. Engineers aren't always the best communicators when talking to non-engineers. This can result in their input being devalued or not considered at all. Not to say that all business decisions should be guided solely by engineering, but rather that their concerns should factor into those business decisions. Over the years I've seen this oversight cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention the resulting loss of customers and jobs.

One innovation is to actually move away from project management. The shift is from estimations and deadlines of features, to releasing often, bringing incremental value and getting constant feedback from the customers. This way, the development is going in the direction that is right for the market, instead of implementing ideas of the people in the room, with late stage validations.