Christopher Boyk has a Doctorate of Business Administration, a Masters of Project Management and a Masters of Business Administration. He is currently a project engineer who has worked on over 150 IT projects and been the project and technical lead for several multimillion dollar projects over the last 15 years. He is a trainer for critical chain project management and agile software development methodologies.
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In 2006 I was tired of working exclusively in methodologies and seeing the projects I worked on fail, with so much effort put into them by so many people.
I had just finished my Masters of Project Management and believed in the one and only method to rule all projects. After a particularly bad project deployment where the original PM was removed and two technical leads were reassigned I thought to myself, there must be a better way to manage software projects.
A friend of mine told me about this new form of project management called that encouraged IT professionals to get more engaged in their projects.
When I first started looking at Agile methodologies I thought it could never work.
After all, one must thoroughly think through a project and develop a complete project plan at the beginning of the project because that is what everyone else does. Right? Wrong!
I did some research on the topic and reached out to organizations who were using Agile and found they were much more successful with their sprints, short development cycles. Requirements of the project changed regularly but that was not an issue because the sprints could have different deliverables to meet the new business need. The research showed that more projects succeeded when development time was cut and personnel were allocated to the project for the duration of the sprint.
Most importantly, focusing your personnel to work on the task at hand more than the process will keep them engaged while reducing the possibility of rework.
By 2008, I began teaching project management and started to interview companies who implement Agile and methods.
This convinced me to create a business case to use these methodologies for a project in my company. After some discussion with my functional manager and colleagues, we decided to use Scrum for a upgrade web program project.
The results were fantastic. For the first time in a long time, the project was a success in cost, schedule, and quality. The user was delighted with the results and continue to be delighted with projects conducted this way.
Great results are not guaranteed with any project management methodology but Agile certainly can help to make your software projects more successful. If you manage projects that are not IT projects I recommend using similar methods such as to help your organization manage projects effectively.
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