I just finished
forming a new company called Crafting Bytes with Brad Cunningham and Ike
Ellis. We wanted to start taking on
bigger projects using the techniques that have made us so successful as
consultants. Over time we have noticed
that we do much better with the projects when we take control of the project
management as well as the development rather than simply augmenting the
development staff. What is different
about our project management style than the project management style of other
companies that we work with?
One major difference
is that we don't use scrum. In a sprint
developers spend a lot of time estimating the work. Estimating can be important when the estimate
is used to determine whether or not the work should take place at all. However, in most cases companies were using
the estimate to inform management when the product was supposed to ship, so
that they could relay that information to the customer. It would be a better idea to relay the
information to the customer *after* the work has been completed. It is much more accurate that way. The other reason managers were requiring
estimates was to figure out how much work should be completed this sprint. So in other words managers were requiring
estimates for the sole purpose of the project management methodology they were
using.
The thing is
estimates take a lot of time, and they are rarely accurate. Our thought was let's forget scrum and just
go with a simple Kanban board (from the Lean school of thinking). By doing this we can save ourselves countless
hours of trying to figure out how much time things are going to take, and spend
more time simply doing them.
OK, so that saves a
couple days every sprint, but then what is the purpose of having a project
manager at all? I admit that the project
managers of many companies are totally unnecessary. You know the type, they spend most of their
time polling individual people "are you done yet". They could easily be replaced by voice
recognition software that recognizes the word "yes". This isn't really project management, it is
instead project reaction. Project
*management* would be managing the work of the project, prior to it
starting. In short a project managers
job is to figure out which work is the most important and which work is so
unimportant it doesn't need to be done at all.
Great project managers remove all unnecessary tasks, that is all tasks
that don't lead to working software, and prioritize which features are the most
important for the business and the user.
In short they control the prioritized list.
Thinking of project
management as simply controlling the list of things that need to get done and
prioritizing the most important simplifies the job of the project manager and
helps the team achieve minimum "time to value" - a vastly underrated
metric.
