What is a Project?

What is a Project?

No alt text provided for this image

How can an organization get its hands around all of what is needed to deliver value to customers?

Ask a selection of your colleagues or LinkedIn connections what they think a project is, and the answers you get may vary quite a bit. For example, just over a week ago, I had a great discussion with @Steve Tendon, the creator of Tameflow, and @Ian Heptinstall, a Lecturer in Project Management at the University of Birmingham, UK.?

The discussion started with Ian sharing thoughts and experiences of his first contact with Agile about two decades ago.?Ian’s thoughts - most of what agile was bringing to the world is just good project management.?

The discussion touched on what a project is. Whether an agile way of working or serial/predictive way of working, in my experience, most projects are focused on a subset of the value-add activities needed to provide value to a customer.?

I ask you to picture the flow of work, all the significant high-level activities that take place in your organization to fulfill a request from a customer or sales team member, or an idea from a Stakeholder to provide something of value to a customer. For an IT-enabled organization, if you are on an agile team, your project typically would start with an approved business case or some other high-level vision/requirements.?Is the work, the agile team would do what you think a project is?

What about the other value-adding activities that may also need to take place??Was there an earlier project to determine what the value to the customer would be and then approval to move forward??What about any supporting areas of the organization that had work to do, such as the Marketing area creating a campaign? Was that also a project??How about operational support (not just support to maintain the IT systems) but changes to business process, maybe training field workers or new activity in a manual part of the process when interacting with a customer.?Is that a project?

Ian led us into this part of the discussion by calling all of the work to get value delivered to the customer a “Work Package.”?In Discipline Agile, we now have the Minimum Business Increment (MBI), and in Tameflow, there is the Minimal Outcome – Value Effort (MOVE).?Ian, Steve, and I shared our perspective on all three of these, and I feel we arrived at a very similar point. They are containers to describe everything, at a high level, that needs to be done for that value to be delivered.

In my opinion and experience, the MBI is one of the most critical additions to Disciplined Agile.?As a container of information, it bridges communication through the value stream. We identify all of the value-adding activities from the development value stream (IT), supporting value stream (marketing, legal, etc.), enabling value stream (infrastructure, procurement, etc.), and operational value stream.?This approach replaces the often-disjointed nature of each area in the organization having its project with little coordination or alignment.

Disciplined Agile MBI, Tameflow MOVE, or Ian’s Work Package - there is a growing awareness of how organizations can shift from siloed projects to a strategy that enables value to flow quicker to customers.

No alt text provided for this image
Letícia Otoni

Disciplined Agile | Gest?o de Projetos | Agilidade | Lideran?a

3 年

Excellent discussion, Joshua!!

回复
Giampaolo Marucci

PMBOK-7 co-writer. Dr. Computer Science. IBM - Project Management. PMI Authorized Training Partner Instructor for PMP and Disciplined Agile. Consultancy, Management, Training, Software, AI, DevOps, Cloud, Agile, Lean.

3 年

A temporary endeavor to realize a unique product, service, or result.

回复
S. Michael Nelson

Architect of Organizational Excellence| Driving Executive Success and Team Cohesion

3 年

Not sure I understand “Whether an agile way of working or serial/predictive way of working” as it seems like a false dichotomy. 1. Agile should be delivery predictably. 2. Waterfall has a proven track record of being predictably unreliable. So the entire premise of the comparison is false. A project, by definition, is a short-term effort by any entity engaged. It is a temporary effort which will not be supported by the team(s) developing it. Anything else is a Product.

回复
Claudia Alcelay

AI & Bias PhD Researcher | EdTech Award Winner | MIT | AI & PM Contributor | PMP | EU Advisor | Peer Reviewer | Founder

3 年

This is an interesting approach Joshua. Thank you for sharing. You refer to a very strong aspect related to MBIs and the different value streams that they convey: development value stream (IT), supporting value stream (marketing, legal, etc.), enabling value stream (infrastructure, procurement, etc.), and operational value stream. This is what make MBIs applicable not only to IT product development but also to other industries. It would be really interesting if you could bring this topic to one of your online discussions with Steve Tendon and others.

Michel Thiry, PhD, PMI Fellow

Managing Partner, Valense Ltd. | Strategic Consultant | Author | Speaker | Team Coach | Dyslexic Thinker

3 年

Joshua Barnes, thank you for this, I really enjoyed the discussion with Ian and Steve and look forward to more of those. I have been reflecting on the link between projects and agile for quite some time and this is my take on Work Packages and MBIs. (I am not familiar with MOVE, so will not comment) Work packages can be of various size; it is the point at which the project manager delegates work and the lowest level of work they directly manage. Each work package comprises one or more activities. A work package’s OUTPUT is a specific deliverable, or MVP. The OUTPUT, once used by operations, becomes a CAPABILITY, a MMF (Minimum Marketable Feature) in a DA context. This CAPABILITY/MMF generates OUTCOMES (Minimum Marketable Release (MMR) in DA) that are associated to user stories. In my opinion, the MBI is the BENEFIT, a positive outcome that adds VALUE. Outcomes and MMRs are a set of features that addresses needs, whereas the MBI, or benefit, should generate value for the organization. See also https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6821129816301998080/

要查看或添加评论,请登录

Joshua Barnes的更多文章

社区洞察

其他会员也浏览了