Becoming Agile: Part 1 - Things that matter

Books upon books and blogs upon blogs have been written to express the nature of this thing called Project Management. In recent years, the discipline has gotten a lot of attention as the pace of time-to-market increases moment by moment, and gaining a competitive edge in most markets is no longer an issue of carving out a niche. In fact, as fast as you find a niche, 5 competitors may have lined up their race for an IPO... I've seen it over and over...

However, for those of us in enterprise settings, that is settings in which the primary product(s) of the enterprise is not directly software-related, the idea of project management takes on a complexity akin to the difference between a pane of glass and a multifaceted jewel. And as such, this complexity is driving us to discover the aspects of project management that will actually work for us, and at the same time, allow our organization to move forward at an increasingly rapid pace.

After much reading, digging, trying/failing, and attempting to get a handle on it, here are the embattled lessons that we are discovering in our area:

• Agile/Scrum/Lean/SAFE/DevOps all are trying accomplish similar goals, and can be boiled down the essence of: early delivery of business value, transition from deadlines to KPI relevancy, and a desire to see small teams working effectively together to own small goals.
• Agile approaches don't always beat out waterfall (It's true, especially in the enterprise!), but they usually do. Knowing how to assign which methodology is a holy grail of PM these days.
• Environment is more than half the battle. Making sure people have fallback job descriptions and duties is key to ensuring consistency of support. Making sure people feel a strong margin of safety to fail is key. Filling the space with the right buzz words like, "unpegging", "self-organizing teams", "stop information-hoarding" really matters. It sets moods and expectations.
• Teamifying is everything. We don't let anyone do anything alone if we can help it. From paired-programming to quick stand-up meetings. Collaboration is key.
• Slack/HipChat/IRC/Hangouts/Lync - Doesn't really matter which one used. Get people away from email like it was a rare virus. Urging people to share info and forcing it out into a group space is game-changing. I cannot overstate that.
• There is no perfect PM tool. Endless searches can be done to find the perfect tool. Just keep looking and listening. The landscape changes daily. We are using a variety for different purposes. Business level scrums are using Trello/GDocs/Slack. Development teams are using Slack/Trello/Pivotal Tracker. Our coordination team is evaluating Wrike, Redmine, and a few others. They use project or Gantter to throw together quick high-level schedules. Atlassian is doing great things. We are looking at Confluence for a wiki (Sharepoint is another option). Redmine's wiki has a plugin to do full HTML dev...
• Managing internal initiatives is challenging. Learning to regenerate all the relevant documentation weekly is changing how we do business. We generate weekly reports on service levels, produce metrics for management on change levels, project prioirity, and are working on product roadmap. I use a mixture of Covey's Quadrants and GTD to prioritize tasks among my my teams. On GDocs, it is a dream.
• We do time-tracking with Toggl to keep things simple. We track time against products and projects to model our ROI against not just business value, but product maturity.

Overall, it is important to keep changing. Always keep looking to be better and better. Irrelevance is a breath away. Don't forget that. Tomorrow must be better than today. Always. And it can happen too. Many companies are making that happen and gathering momentum all the time. Jump in.