Monday, January 16, 2006

Scrum Project Management - 3 Basic Questions

Scrum employs the dreaded daily meeting. The purpose is to keep everyone focused on the RIGHT work. A daily focus helps to manage the "overwhelm" factor.

Scrum asks 3 basic questions:
  1. What have you done during the last 24 hours? (Progress, work completed to date)
  2. What do you plan to do in the next 24 hours? (Forward planning, work you are about to do)
  3. What is stopping/delaying you from getting it done? (Issues and risk management)

Whether you Scrum or not, have you asked your team members these questions lately? Do you ask them daily? Especially if your project is a "fixed time" project, I suggest you employ the daily meeting (doesn't have to take long at all!) and start asking those questions!

For more on Scrum see also Methods & Tools Articles Archives in HTML

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posted by FemPM @ 11:48 PM, Read More...  
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1 Comments:

At 7:29 PM, Blogger Jerry Manas said...

Another methodology that benefits from daily reporting is Critical Chain. The idea is to increase the sense of urgency and to have regular updates on what's remaining.

It's also important not to dilute efforts by multitasking critical resources across a zillion activities. Better to have them focus on one thing at a time and stagger projects around the availability of these critical resources.

Then, by measuring a buffer index (i.e. how much of the project buffer is being eaten up), it's easy to tell if you're on schedule. There's also a buffer between a chain of non-critical work and the critical work to prevent the non-critical work from interfering with the primary objectives. But I digress.

The point is that I think Critical Chain can complement Scrum to good effect.

Some companies, such as Honeywell, swear by daily reporting (using a simple web interface), and are achieving great throughput. It's not as difficult as one might think and doesn't have to be bureacratic.

 

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