12 Classic Mistakes in Project managment and My views on "how Agile Methodology helps to suppress them"

Many companies are implementing Agile methodologies in their projects while the company culture and process are still engaged with traditional project managment methods e.g. Waterfall. Most companies have been working at it for a while but still aren’t seeing the promised benefits and its maybe because it isn’t right for the organization or it also might be due to issues in the implementation of Agile methodologies or their unresonable expectations of the Agile outcomes at the first step.

Twelve classic mistakes of software projects had been introduced by SteveMcConnell [1] and hundred more mistakes could be counted and are currently listed on various blogs online. In this Article I have mentioned how Agile solutions would help to avoid these mistakes.

Images are taken from SteveMcConnell article and plain texts are my contents.

Mistake No 1: Undermined Motivation

in order to address the first mistake I had to read [2] which is an exploratory study of IT project and it investigates how three agile practices, namely daily stand-ups, iteration planning, and iteration retrospectives, contribute to motivation or de-motivation in an agile team. Based on the results motivation can be affected by several factors listed in below image (21 motivational factors) which can take affect from three agile practices.?

As a consequence of using these practices, individuals have clearly defined goals, share and rotate tasks, feel part of the team, are very supportive and willing to assist each other, have increased levels of trust, and provide informal praise and recognition to each other, all of which help to motivate team members. The study also highlights how the practices may cause de-motivation through increased stress, and pressure to deliver.

Tables 1 and 2 identifies new factors of motivation and de-motivation as a result of agile practices.

Table 1. Impact of agile practices on motivation

Table 2. impact of agile practices on de-motivation

Mistake No 2: problematic employee

Building and developing agile teams as a group of professionals who build the output every sprint has some requirements which can help to tame rouge programmers. There is No title for team members (no one is senior than other) and all team members share accountability. Also, as Agile development team members should have complementary skills (Agile method prefers generalizing specialists with T-Shaped Skills) and each individual team member dose not possess all the skill requirements. In my opinion, this method of sharing workload and making every one mutually accountable can reduce the amount of egocentricity of problematic employees.

Mistake No 3: noisy office

?“Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task” – Gloria Mark.

Companies looking to transition from the traditional open-plan office to an agile office design will benefit from a more focused and productive workforce. So, implementing agile methods needs also a change in office physical environment.

Mistake No 4: Abandoning planning under pressure.

Scrum product backlog, sprint backlog an Burndown charts help to increase transparency and follow project based on plans. Plans can be scheduled and followed in sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review meetings so it is not possible to abandon planning.

Also Kanban method keeps work in progress (WIP) limited and helps to check and follow tasks based on plan smoothly and make sure they are finished properly with an agreed Definition of Done.

Mistake No 5: Shortchanging upstream activities

Agile planning is done iteratively the plans can be changed during project execution time by manipulating project Backlog. So if all designs and architectures are not clear at the start, it can be completed later on.

Mistake No 6: Shortchanging quality assurance to improve development speed

Agile applied to the Iron Triangle consists of the 3 end points. Value, Quality and Constraints (Scope, time, resources). Traditional approach in Projects run with predictive approach were aimed to fulfill Scope so time and cost were assumed constant and features could be eliminated, while in agile method time and cost and quality are fixed in plans while features are tested and delivered incrementally. So eliminating reviews and test planning will not happen when time for development?of each feature is preplanned.

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Mistake No 7: Lack of feature-creep control.

In Scrum method the product owner can modify backlog and the scrum team and its stakeholders can inspect the results and adjust backlog for the next Sprint.

Mistake No 8: Silver-bullet syndrome

As humans, we want to believe that there is a solution, even a magical solution that will get us out of our most dire situations. If management assumes that a solution, for example an Agile approach, is a silver bullet, management will assume that the problem will be completely solved with no other action necessary but Agile is not an exemption and it is not a silver bullet.

Mistake No 9: Wasting time in the “fuzzy front end.“

Starting with a product backlog that is never complete and initiating project by delivering MVP in each scrum can avoid prolonged preplanning phases.

Mistake No 10: Insufficient user input

“end-user involvement” is a key task in agile scrum because during the sprint scope may be clarified and renegotiated with the Product Owner as more is learned. Also by delivering constantly MVP and changing final result adaptively all user inputs can be considered.

Mistake No 11: Overly aggressive schedules

In Kanban “Limit work in progress (WIP)” can assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress at each workflow state and “Measure and manage flow” can be used to handle the task progress smooth and also optimize the process to make the cycle time as small and predictable as possible.

Also Scrum breaks product backlog to scrum backlog and Estimated velocity of each sprint can be calculated and managed.

Mistake No 12: Adding developers to a late project.

Resource calculation in scrum can help to estimate required man-days and thus at the start of project we can make sure enough?employees are assigned to the project.?

[1] https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/classic-mistakes/

[2] Orla McHugh, Kieran Conboy, et all,?“Using Agile Practices to Influence Motivation within IT Project Teams”, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 2011, 23(2), 85–110