Project Management

  1. By definition, project managers must efficiently and effectively execute projects. balance both internal and external stakeholder interests and keep both sides in sync over time. 
  2. understand customers' requirements, address their changing needs and manage the dynamics of those changes. 
  3. manage those changes throughout the enterprise, vendors, suppliers and partners.
Fundamentals: agreement, scheduling, resource control
    Tasks according to PRINCE2: direct, motivate, plan monitoring, prepare staging; produce contract, risk/business management, change control, report/liase with programme management, project board, account managers and suppliers; prepare lessons learned, follow-on actions required, end project report

    Project Coordinator - subset role of a Project Manager, to keep the project and all related processes running smoothly, coordination of activities, resources, equipment, and information
    • strong correlation between components of trust and productivity . Trust is based on communication effectiveness, conflict management and rapport. 
    • Understanding  of cultural differences (e.g. punctuality) required for managing the multicultural teams, building trust between offshore and onsite cultures
    • Tasks that can reduce PM's communication channels
      • Time Zone Management
      • Cross Cultural Management including HR issues.
      • Creating Teams based on competencies and skills. 
      • Task Assignment based on the competencies of the team members as he/she knows the team closely.
    • distinction between a role and individually identified people and one person can perform many roles - PM assuming BA, test analyst role
    • risks and challenges of offshore project management and their mitigation strategies.
    • RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) model to define the roles and responsibilities of the Project Manager and a Project Coordinator.

    Test Driven Development

    writing test first

    Pair Programming

    + saves time to spot mistakes
    - could lead to imbalance, lack of collaboration

    Agile

    • iteration
    • functionality implementation
    • collaboration
    • responding to changes
    Cycles
    Planning
    Requirement analysis
    Design
    Coding
    Unit testing
    Acceptance testing

    Scrum

    Repetitive cycles of:
    • requirements gathering
    • design
    • implementation
    • test
    Roles
    Product owner: hold vision, analyse market trend, gather requirement, define priority, motivate team, should not distribute work nor throw new requirement during sprint
    Scrum master: guidance and protection of the team
    Team member: select amount of work, committed to work load, 5-9 people

    Sprint 
    2-4 weeks span
    Planning: define sprint goal, and setup spring backlog
    Daily scrum: ~15 min. session in the morning, 1)review yesterday's performance and 2)challenges, 3)plan today
    Review: assessment to defined goal
    Retrospective: suggestion and adoption for the following sprint of start/stop/continue items

    Documents
    Product backlog: prioritised features, comprised of features, bugs, technical work(development environment), knowledge acquired
    Sprint backlog: task list extracted from prioritised features in product backlog
    Burndown chart: amount of work left per iteration, story points
    Scrum task board: stories in stages of to do, in process, to verify, done

    Kanban

    continuous flow, no fixed time slots
    resource oriented, per head unit, specialised roles
    prone to restructuring risk due to on-demand delivery
    slack time granted at bottleneck occurrences
    provides flexibility and customisability

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