ultimate-guide-to-project-management-optimized.pdf

The Ultimate Guide to Project Management Learn everything you need to successfully manage projects and get them done Zapier © 2016 Zapier Inc. It started as an idea, that next amazing thing your team is going to do. Perhaps you’ll build the next big thing, add a feature your users have been waiti...

The Ultimate Guide to Project Management Learn everything you need to successfully manage projects and get them done Zapier © 2016 Zapier Inc. It started as an idea, that next amazing thing your team is going to do. Perhaps you’ll build the next big thing, add a feature your users have been waiting for, or write that book you’ve been thinking about for years. Perhaps you’ll put a man on Mars, or land a rocket on a boat, or reinvent the car. Perhaps. But first, you’ll need a plan. Plans map your path, list what it takes to get there, and what needs done first. They’re the essential ingredient to making sure your rocket has enough fuel, that you have a team ready to launch it, and that you actually build the rocket in the first place. They’re what make project management work. There’s no set way to make a plan, nothing you must do to get from zero to hero. But there are a handful of popular project management strategies, dozens of project management apps, and an entire ecosystem of tools to gather feedback and set deadlines and track time and manage those projects. You’re ready to launch that rocket, but first, it’s back to the basics. It’s time for Project Management 101. In this book, you’ll learn everything you need to know about project management. You’ll find detailed overviews of the most popular project management strategies, advice from teams around the world on how they manage projects, and roundups of the best tools to help your projects flow smoothly. It’s everything you need to plan that rocket launch—and make sure it lands in the right place. Who Is This Guide For? Projects come in all shapes and sizes. Your team’s next big inven- tion? That’s a project. Remodeling your kitchen? Ditto. This book starts out with the basics of project management—it gets you up to speed on what lean, gantt, scrum and other project management terms are all about. It’s perfect for the first time project manager, or anyone who feels overwhelmed by projects. Then, there’s app roundups of the best project management tools, along with the app stacks teams use to handle everything else in their projects. Those come alongside expert advice on running projects, choosing software, and using project management apps for personal tasks. They’re perfect for anyone managing projects— whether you’re looking for better tools and tricks to keep projects on schedule, or are just starting out. Contents Who Is This Guide For?.................. iii Intro............................... 1 Chapter 1: An Intro to Project Management........ 2 Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond......... 6 Why Project Management?................ 8 A Quick History of Project Management......... 10 Popular Project Management Systems.......... 12 Traditional Project Management............. 14 Agile............................ 17 Six Sigma......................... 29 PRINCE2.......................... 32 Project Management Systems in Play.......... 36 The Best Project Management System for You...... 40 Chapter 3: The 5 Essential Skills of a Successful Project Manager.......................... 42 Wield the Politician Inside You.............. 43 Use the Details to Shape the Strategy.......... 45 Communicate, Communicate, Communicate...... 47 Lead by Example..................... 49 Create Balance....................... 51 CONTENTS Chapter 4: Kanban 101: How to Use Kanban Boards to Manage Your Next Project................ 54 Kanban: A Short History................. 55 Kanban Board Basics................... 57 8 Kanban Board Apps................... 69 6 Ways to Test Drive a Kanban Board.......... 72 Create Your Own Kanban Boards............ 80 Chapter 5: The Best Project Management Software: 50 Tools for Team Task Management........... 82 How to Pick the Best Project Management App..... 84 The Best Core Project Management Apps........ 90 The Best Project Management Apps for Chat and Mes- saging........................ 127 The Best Project Management Apps for Clients..... 132 The Best Customizable Tools for Project Management. 148 Bonus: Download a Project Management Apps Cheat Sheet......................... 154 Chapter 6: Get Organized: How to Pick Project Manage- ment Software in 5 Steps................ 157 1. Research the Collaboration Features.......... 158 2. Calculate and Justify the Cost............. 160 3. Try the Alternatives (then, Try More Alternatives).. 161 4. Get Feedback From Your Team............. 163 5. Outline Your Implementation Plan........... 164 The Software Picks of our PM Panel........... 165 Find New Project Management Apps to Test Drive... 168 Beyond Your Project Management Software Search... 169 Chapter 7: Project Management Software Stacks: The Apps That 13 Companies Use to Manage Projects.. 171 Stampede Design’s Stack for User Experience Design.. 172 Thumbprint’s Stack for Printing Logistics........ 175 Bryan Landers’ Stack for Product Design Consulting.. 176 CONTENTS Anguleris Technologies’ Stack for Information Modeling 178 StarOfService’s Stack for On-Demand Services..... 180 Tinkerbox Studios’ Stack for App Development..... 184 Delve’s Stack for Intelligence............... 186 High Sails Media’s Stack for Photography, Video, and Design........................ 188 Bata Food’s Stack for Food Export............ 190 Conneqtify’s Stack for Building Communities...... 192 Interlike’s Stack for Development............ 194 White Room Automation’s Stack for Industrial Connec- tivity......................... 196 Chapter 8: Don’t Overlook Standard Operating Proce- dures: Use These Apps to Put Them in Place..... 199 The Great Train Wreck of 1856.............. 200 The Birth of SOPs..................... 201 How to Build Your Own Standard Operating Procedures 201 The Tools to Build Standard Operating Procedures... 203 Preempting Problems with SOPs............. 212 Chapter 9: How to Manage your Personal Tasks with a Project Management App................ 214 Why Use a Project Management App?.......... 215 Choose a Project Management App........... 217 Create a Productivity Workflow............. 219 Extra Resources from Zapier................. 224 Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 13 Common Project Management Terms Agile: An iterative form of project management where tasks are completed through specific phases Critical Path: The list of the critical tasks that must be completed before a project is finished; together, they show the total estimated project time Event Chain Diagram: A bar graph of events in a project and the order they’ll be completed based on resource availability Float: The amount of time a task can be delayed without causing a delay to subsequent tasks or the entire project Gantt Chart: A bar graph and calendar fusion that shows the time each task in a project will require; a form of an event chain diagram that’s focused on time. Milestone: The time when important tasks in a project are completed Project Manager (PM): The team member whose top respon- sibility is to plan, carry out and close a project. Resources: Elements required to complete a project, includ- ing time, equipment, supplies, team members, and other resources Scope: The definition of what the project will cover; when this grows during the project it’s called “scope creep” Sprint: Also called iteration; a period of time in which a certain part of a project is created and shipped Traditional Project Management (TPM): Basic project man- agement where tasks are completed one after another With that knowledge tucked away, it’s time to find a project management system that can fit your team. We’ll first look at Traditional and Agile project management—the two main ideas that most other systems are based on—then dive into Scrum, Kanban, Six Sigma and more. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 14 Traditional Project Management Perhaps the most obvious way to break up your projects into a workflow, traditional project management is often referred to as “waterfall” project management because it handles one thing after another in a linear order. Think of it like your favorite mobile game, such as Candy Crush: you can’t unlock the next level until you’ve beat the one you’re in (and hopefully, your project is just as fun if not frustratingly addictive). Traditional Project Management, or TPM as it’s abbreviated, stresses on-time delivery within a stringent budget. It’s best for projects where tasks need to be completed one after another—or where you want to emphasize planning and design before you start building the actual project. You could make your own “traditional” project management system by breaking any project down into steps that must be completed one after another, but standard TPM has six specific stages: initiation, planning and design, execution, testing, monitoring and comple- tion. Initiation phase: The project manager and team determine the product requirements. Otherwise known as as “require- ments determination”, it’s a fancy way of saying everyone Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 15 participates in a brain dump, listing everything that needs to happen to get to the finish line. Planning and design phase: This step can be broken into two categories: basic design and detailed design. During this phase, the team makes sure the proposed design meets the product requirements. For software design teams, for example, this is the point where they choose their coding language and decide how they want to structure the user experience. Execution (or Implementation) and Testing phase: These are the steps where the ball really gets rolling—construction and integration all happen in this chapter. Following the detailed design, the team builds the product, measuring its develop- ment against specific metrics established in previous phases. Each part of the execution has its own steps, which move the project to the next half-phase: testing. Just as important as the design phase, testing is where you discover and fix any glitches, whether it’s bugs in the software or poorly placed wiring in a construction project. After testing, anything that still needs work gets shifted back to the execution phase— round and round you’ll go, until the project is finished. Monitoring and completion (or Management and Mainte- nance) phase: This phase is the long tail of your project, the work that never quite ends. You’re dedicated to keeping customers and users happy with your product by discovering ways to improve it, while simultaneously maintaining and providing support for the product. Dig deeper into traditional project management styles, and you’ll find a few variations on these phases. Not all projects need every stage of the traditional waterfall model—some may need only three, while others need an “iterative waterfall” where work is divided into sprints rather than blocks of start-to-finish subprojects. Either way, the idea is the same: your project is broken into phases, and one must be completed before the other. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 16 Since TPM is such a time-driven approach, common scheduling tools work great for traditional project management. You can list phases in a to-do list app, or block out time on a calendar. The best TPM tool, though, is the trusty Gantt chart which helps visualize each phase of your project and the time it’ll take. You could make one in a spreadsheet like Smartsheet, or use traditional project management tools like Microsoft Project to build them. Traditional Project Management Strengths True traditional project management is perhaps an old school model, but its strengths have allowed it to keep hold. It requires upper management to clearly define what it is they want, giving the project focus and consistency early on. The emphasis on customer review and testing is meant to catch (and attack) problems early, causing a small headache now so that teams can avoid a horrid migraine later. It ensures the project will be well planned and tested thoroughly before delivery—something crucial for many real-world projects. TPM can potentially cut down on stress and missed deadlines be- cause each phase allows enough time for full completion and worst- case scenarios, meaning a disaster-free project can be delivered before deadline. With everything planned out, you’ll know the exact resources and time needed for the project—even if they may be over-estimated in rigidly-set estimates. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 17 Traditional Project Management Weaknesses TPM’s rigidity is also its greatest downfall. It’s like an old, dry tree: it’s rigid, and doesn’t do well with change. Toyota, where Lean and Kanban project management were pioneered in their manufacturing departments, is even criticized for using TPM in their software development since it makes them less flexible to changes. It’s perfect for places like the construction industry, where project scope and direction remains relatively unchanged throughout the project. But if time and resources aren’t your main constraint, or you need more flexibility to change your project as it’s under development, you might find that another project management method is better for you. Agile Every project isn’t structured in a way that’d work well with the Traditional Project Management method. Think back to our meal example: while cooking one dish might work perfectly in a traditional, one step at a time model, serving a four-course meal would be impossible if you were waiting for each part of the meal to be fully finished before starting on another. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 18 That’s where Agile, or iterative, project management comes into play. Instead of breaking your project down into phases that each have to be done before the other, you split your project up into smaller projects and ship each one as steps towards reaching the full goal. You’ll plan the broad ideas of the project and divide it up, then plan, design, build, and test each part of the project individually. That lets you ship faster, and makes it easier to adapt the project to new needs before shipping it again. Agile isn’t a new concept—iterative project management, at any rate, has been a common idea since at least 1957. In software de- velopment, however, Agile became popular with the release of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. That document emphasized collaboration and the ability to respond to change, two practices TPM makes difficult. Agile on its own isn’t a full project management method—it’s more of an idea of how projects could be managed. Scrum, Lean, Kanban and other more structured project management methods came from the iterative or Agile ideas, improved on them, and gave teams a better foundation to start managing their own projects. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 19 Agile Strengths Agile’s greatest strength is its flexibility—it can be almost anything you want it to be. That’s why it’s the framework behind so many other project management systems. You can take the Agile idea of breaking your project into completable chunks and doing each at a time, and then customize the overall process to fit your needs. One of the main idea of Agile, as espoused in the Agile Manifesto, is “Responding to change over following a plan.” The flexibility you get from a less rigid system that still puts an emphasis on shipping parts of your project can be enough to make Agile worth adopting. Or, if your projects are usually open-ended where you need to continually ship new parts—say, a blog with new posts every day— Agile is a perfect way to break down your work. Agile Weaknesses As so often happens, Agile’s strength is its greatest weakness. A flexible system like Agile can make it difficult to focus and push your projects to completion if you’re not careful. There’s less set in stone, and no process to make sure the project is continuing Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 20 smoothly, making it easy for projects to lose direction. You can add your own processes on top of Agile—or just make sure your team’s always communicating and pushing the project forward—or you might end up finding that one of Agile’s more focused derivatives are better. Scrum Arguably the most structured framework of the Agile methods, Scrum was first introduced in the 1986 as a way for “teams to work as a unit to reach a common goal,” according to its inventors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. Scrum takes parts of Tradi- tional and Agile project management ideas, and combines them for a structured yet flexible way to manage projects. Like Agile, Scrum breaks projects up into tasks that are completable on their own, and then assigns each a “sprint”—two to four-week slots of time dedicated to ship that phase of the project, with daily sprints to ship some part of that phase. It’s that focus on time that makes Scrum a bit more like TPM, bringing more structure to the Agile idea. Then, to make sure the project is progressing as expected and meet- ing goals that may have changed along the way, Scrum requires a reassessment—and potential project changes—at the end of each sprint. It also divides responsibilities into three roles: the Product Owner (PO), the Scrum Master and the Team. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 21 The Product Owner, who should be deeply familiar with all aspects of development, makes sure that everything aligns with business goals and customer needs with a mile-high view of the over- all project. The Scrum Master is the team cheerleader—a liaison between the PO and the rest of the team—who makes sure the team is on track in each individual sprint. The Team then is the people working in each sprint, dividing the tasks and making sure everything is shipped. With all this management and focus on deadlines, Scrum’s main structure revolves around 5 meetings: Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective. Backlog Refinement Meeting (also called “Backlog Groom- ing”): This meeting is much like the planning phase of TPM, and is held on day one of each sprint—you’ll look over the tasks left in the project, things left behind from previous sprints, and will decide what to focus on. The PO makes the call on how to prioritize tasks, and this ultimately determines how efficient the sprints are. Sprint Planning Meeting: Once the PO decides what to focus on, this meeting helps the team understand what they’ll be building and why. You could share “user stories,” describ- ing features from the customer’s point of view, or could simply divide tasks for each team to work on during the sprint. Daily Scrum Meetings: Simple daily meetings that should only last about 15 minutes, Scrum meetings are a way for team members to update each other on progress. This meet- ing is not the time or place to air issues—those will go to the Scrum master outside of the daily meetings—but instead is a place to keep the ball rolling. Sprint Review: Since a potentially shippable item is expected at the end of each sprint, the Scrum framework naturally places an emphasis on review. Team members will present Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 22 what they’ve completed to all stakeholders. While this meet- ing pushes accountability, its goal is to make sure that the sprint’s completed items match up with business and user goals. Sprint Retrospective: Held immediately after the sprint review meeting, the Sprint retrospective is full of collabora- tive feedback. Looking at successes and hold ups, everyone decides what is working (what they should continue doing) and what isn’t working (what they should stop doing). This should inspire the focus of the next sprint. Where other project management systems might look like they simplify your projects and make them seem more manageable, Scrum can at first glance look overwhelming. You’ll need to del- egate responsibilities and plan extra meetings—but that overhead can help ensure your projects are successful and stay on track. It’s a structured way to make sure everything gets done. Scrum Strengths Scrum is designed for projects that need parts of the project shipped quickly, while still making it easy to respond to change during the development process. With so many meetings and ways to delegate tasks, it’s also great to use when parts of the team may not be as familiar with a product’s context (i.e. developers from different industry backgrounds working on a system for the financial sector). You’ll always have someone looking out for the project as a whole, Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 23 so if each person on the team doesn’t understand the entire project, that’s OK. Netflix is a great example of Scrum’s ability to help you ship fast. It updates its website every two weeks, and Scrum was a good match because it stresses the user experience, eliminates what doesn’t work, and leaves a small window of time to get things done. For each site iteration, the designers would test new features, forget the ones that didn’t work out and move on to new functionalities. Most of the benefits the Netflix team saw with Scrum was the ability to “fail fast.” As opposed to launching one massive redesign with many components, their bi-weekly incremental design changes were easy to track; if something went awry, they knew exactly what it was tied to—and could fix it, fast. Scrum Weaknesses Like Netflix, you may experience downfalls of Scrum, such as upset designers who saw their beloved work chucked after testing showed it didn’t work—especially when the testing comes so quickly and some may feel that the new ideas would work with more time. You might also have trouble adjusting if your team is accustomed to long release cycles—or, depending on your work, you might find shipping so often isn’t necessary. Scrum’s meetings and management overhead can also be overkill for some projects, turning into something where you’re more focused on planning sprints than you are on actually getting work accomplished during them. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 24 Lean Agile project management dictates that you break your work up into smaller, shippable portions, but it doesn’t say much about how to manage each of those portions of your project. Scrum tries to fix that with managers and meetings; Lean, on the other hand, adds workflow processes to Agile so you can ensure every part of your project is shipped with the same quality. With Lean project management, you’ll still break up your project into smaller pieces of work that can be completed individually. You’ll also define a workflow for each task, something that’s reminiscent of the Apollo project and its five box system. Perhaps you’ll have a planning, design, production, testing, and shipping phase—or any other workflow of phases that you need for your task. Cooking a meal might need a preparation and cooking step, while a writing workflow might need an editing and fact-checking step. Lean’s stages and their flexibility make it a great system for making sure each part of your project is done well. It doesn’t have Scrum’s strict deadlines, or force you to work on one thing at a time as TPM does—in fact, you could have various tasks in various phases of your Lean workflow at the same time. What it does do is let you build a system tailored to your team. Just like Agile, Lean is more of a concept than a set-in-stone project Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 25 management system. You can use the Lean ideas, and build the system you need for your projects. Lean Strengths If you liked the idea of Agile, but wanted a way to make sure each part of your work is consistently finished with the same level of quality and oversight, Lean gives you the extra tools you need to make that happen. It’s still flexible—you can define the stages of your project portions as you want—but there’s enough structure to make your projects a bit more guided. Lean Weaknesses Every part of your project doesn’t necessarily need the same level of oversight or the same steps for completion, but lean treats everything the same. That can be one major downfall in using it to manage projects with diverse parts that all need completed. Lean also doesn’t have any process to make sure the final project is completed, making it easy as it is with Lean to let your projects drag on forever. It’s again something communication can clear up, Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 26 but it is worth keeping in mind. Kanban Lean sounds a bit abstract on its own, but combine it with Kanban and it’s easy to build your own Lean project management system. Conceived by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno and implemented in 1953, Kanban is set up much like a factory floor, where a part might start out as a piece of metal and then, one step at a time, is turned into a finished part through a series of steps. In the same way when using Kanban, you’ll do some work towards a project, then ship that item on down the line to the next station where something else is done. Kanban also pulls inspiration from the grocery store model: for maximum efficiency, carry just enough on your shelves to meet customers demand. So, in Kanban, instead of plowing ahead on shipping a complete project, you can leave tasks at various stages until they’re needed—whether that’s half-made, low-demand parts in a factory, un-edited blog posts in your queue without a publish date, or anything else that’s waiting for a need in your workflow. It’s a lot more laid back than Scrum—there’s no set time for sprints, no assigned roles outside of the product owner, and a zen-like focus on only the task at hand. You could have meetings about your overall projects, or not: it’s up to your team’s needs. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 27 All you have to do is define the stages of your workflow, then setup a way to move each task from one stage to the other. In a factory, you might have different boxes or shelves for each stage: raw materials in the first, half-made parts in the second, and completed parts in the third. For other projects, you might have a card— whether a note in a program, or a physical piece of paper on a board—where you list info about a task, and you’ll move that card to different lists as the task progresses. Your Kanban system can be as flexible as you want—it’s really just a way to visualize the Agile idea—but there’s four pillars of the Kanban philosophy that can help make sure your projects get shipped. These include: Cards (Kanban translates to “visual card”): Each task has a card that includes all relevant info about it; this makes sure everything to complete the tasks is always at hand. Cap on work in progress: Limit how many cards are in play at once; this prevents teams from over-committing. Continuous Flow: Move down the list of backlogs in order of importance, and make sure something’s always being worked on. Constant improvement (otherwise known as “kaizen”): An- alyze the flow to determine how efficiently you’re working, and always strive to improve it. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 28 Kanban Strengths Like Scrum, Kanban fits best with a highly cohesive team that knows what it takes to keep the flow going—but unlike Scrum, it’s designed for teams that are self-motivated and don’t need as much management or deadlines. It’s great for those who lean toward seeing the entire project at a glance. While the two-week Scrum rule is absent and subprojects can take however long they’ve been given, you should still have an overall focus on efficiency—which should help save resources. If you’re careful to follow Kanban rules and only assign as much work as a team can handle, projects are less likely to go past deadline and team members are less likely to juggle other distractions. And because the product owner can change tasks that aren’t currently being worked on along the way, it allows for flexibility without frustration. Kanban Weaknesses If only one of your team members has a certain in-demand skill, the individual can hold up everything. Kanban is ideal for teams that have members with overlapping skills, so that everyone can pitch in Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 29 and help move the backlog list to zero. It’s also best for places where time on the overall project isn’t quite as crucial; if you must ship by certain deadlines, TPM or Scrum give you the time management structure you need. Six Sigma Motorola wasn’t about to let the auto industry take all the credit for project management innovation, so decades after Toyota’s in- troduction of Kanban, the mobile phone company’s engineer Bill Smith created Six Sigma in 1986. It’s a more structured version of Lean than Kanban, one that sets specific stages and adds in more planning to save resources, ship quality products, and eliminate bugs and problems along the way. The ultimate end goal is to make customers happy with a quality product, which is done through continuous improvement heavily reliant on data analysis. You ship parts of your project along the way, while at the same time address product pitfalls that come up— something very similar to the Apollo project’s workflow. This is accomplished through Six Sigma’s five steps, known as Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 30 “DMEDI”: Define, Measure, Explore (or analyze), Develop (or im- prove) and Control. Define: This first step is much like the initial steps in other project management frameworks. Everyone determines the scope of the project, gets information from all sides, and determines what the business goals are (for example, sales). Measure: Because Six Sigma is big on data, the measurement stage establishes the nature in which the team will calculate progress—your overall goals. Seeing the rate of success— the value to the consumer as well as the business—as a quantifiable thing is at the core of Six Sigma. Explore: During the exploration stage, it’s up to the project manager to figure out the ways in which the team can meet and exceed product requirements. This keeps you from going over budget and missing deadlines. If something didn’t work last time, it’s likely not going to work this time, so project managers (PMs) have to be adept at thinking outside of the box. Develop: It’s only at this fourth step is a strategic plan is put in place. And it’s a detailed one—anything that will or might be needed to get the job done finds a place somewhere in this plan. Most of the project’s momentum occurs here, because you apply the plan, work on the next project map, and measure results as you go. Control: The last stage is about long-term improvement, which is what a Six Sigma project strives for. A documented review full of lessons learned is applied throughout the company, and to future projects, as well. It’s much like a Kanban approach, only this time with set stages for the project that make you plan, define goals, and test for quality at each stage. You’ll likely end up with more meetings than Kanban calls for, but you’ll also have a far more structured way to approach Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 31 each task. And just like Kanban, you can customize the phases for what your project needs—you’ll just need to keep the measure and control steps in place if you want to learn from past projects and continually improve your processes. Six Sigma Strengths Six Sigma runs a tight ship, which can help you continually improve your processes and ship better results. By defining the goals and then reviewing them later, you’ll have objective data to measure project success with—something that’s far better than just going on intuition. While gathering and learning from data can take up a significant amount of time, you’ll be able to learn from what you’ve done and improve your work in the future—and that’s where time and quality savings should come in. There are plenty of scenarios in which the job is never really done— that’s where Six Sigma shines. It helps you ship your tasks, learn from them, and improve the next time around. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 32 Six Sigma Weaknesses Project manager seem to have similar gripes about Six Sigma: cost savings are the goal but not guaranteed since customer satisfaction will take precedence. If you’re continually adjusting your goals with each task in the project, it’s easy to let things spiral out of control even while you’re trying to ship your best possible work. Then, Six Sigma’s underlying motto that good is never good enough can be frustrating for some, who may feel like the ghost of continu- ous improvement never brings them the satisfaction of finalizing a job well done. Some project may only be done once, and the focus on metrics and incremental improvements may seem unnecessary there. PRINCE2 NASA wasn’t the only government organization working to im- prove project management. The British government has honed their project management methods for years, cumulating with PRINCE2 in 1989. An acronym for PRojects IN Controlled Environments version 2, PRINCE2 throws sprints out the window, and instead ap- proaches a project as one big sprint and stresses quality of delivery— like a traditional project management version of Six Sigma. The framework is more focused on the ends rather than the means; what’s expected of the end product will determine the scope and shape the planning. There are three interests at play with PRINCE2: the business interest (is it going to make money?), the user interest (will customers find this valuable?) and the the supplier interest (do we have what we need to make this happen?). Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 33 PRINCE2 has a more clearly defined personnel structure than most project management systems, one that works for larger projects that governments and other large organizations must undertake. Each team member has specific roles, which carry through all 7 of PRINCE2’s stages: Startup, Direction, Initiation, Control, Boundary Management, Planning, Delivery and Closing. Startup: First on the agenda: leadership chooses a project manager and clearly relays everything that they expect the product to be. The PM, whose main focus is the fine details, reports to the project board, which puts together the project’s direction. The project board steers the course of the project and is ultimately accountable for its success. The remaining members make up the team. Initiation: During this step, the project manager writes the “initiation document,” a plan to bring the project into reality. Once the project board signs off, it’s time for the control stage, when the project is divided into phases. These phases don’t have to last the same amount of time; the duration of each is determined by what each realistically demands. Like waterfall, a phase must be completed before moving on to the next one. Direction: It’s not enough to have oversight—you also need to know exactly how a project should be overseen and managed. The direction phase sets the overall management structure for the project, outlines how each stage should progress, and what should happen if something changes Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 34 along the way. Control: Some amount of change is inevitable, which is why PRINCE2’s per-stage review can be helpful. The roadmap for each phase is determined by the review of the previous one. So while there may have been a general plan, that can be manipulated if a review shows a need for something else. Once again, the project board has to sign off on this—bringing double the meaning to the “Boundary Management” stage. Boundary Management: The management stage looks at product delivery: what is going out (for example, what fea- tures will an app keep or chuck?), how it’s going out, and asks, is the product that is going out exactly is what the business wanted, and meets all requirements? Delivery: From a project manager’s perspective, this is where the most important oversight takes place. As work begins on product delivery, the project manager is in charge of making sure that everyone is doing a job that aligns with the project’s goals and getting approvals once parts of the project are completed. Closing: After everything is said and done, the closing stage still remains. Closing is an in-depth analysis of how the project faired. This is put into a report, which also has to be approved by the project board. That may be a bit much for some projects, so you can still customize the stages for your needs, while still keeping the same general idea of PRINCE2’s structure, planning, and reporting back to upper management. Just like Scrum is a more structured version of Agile, PRINCE2 is a more structured TPM system, with some of the benefits of the Lean approach thrown in. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 35 PRINCE2 Strengths PRINCE2 works best when the stakes are high and there needs to be several pairs of authoritative eyes on the project every step of the way. If you’re big on feedback and guaranteeing nothing will go wrong, this might work well for you. That’s why PRINCE2 is so popular in government offices—it’s used in the United Kingdom’s government, and is the standard for project management for the United Nations. It’s been successfully used by VocaLink to streamline real-time money transfers between banks in Australia and the UK, something where there is zero tolerance for flaws and where communication is essential. PRINCE2’s Weaknesses Despite PRINCE2’s success in governments, it isn’t without its drawbacks. If used in the wrong environment, there’s lots of oppor- tunity for bottlenecks and politics. Because of the extensive reviews and sign-offs, you might end up wrestling for control or find that work is delayed because someone hasn’t signed off yet. And strictly defined roles can stave off a sense of true collaboration. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 36 Project Management Systems in Play Every project and team are unique, and so the project management systems that work best for each team are different. There are teams around the world that use each of these systems in wide ranges of industries—you’ll surely find software developers using TPM, governments using Scrum, and grocery stores using Six Sigma if you look hard enough. More often, you’ll find teams using their own take on project management, using the best parts of different systems to fit their needs. Here are three stories where project management saved the day—stories that might help you figure out which system would work best in your team. Kanban Back in 2010, the Vienna-based startup Tupalo, a social network that lets users review restaurants and places of interest, was expe- riencing rapid growth. Dealing with a never-ending mountain of requests from both users and employees, the developers were faced with more tasks than they could process. Instead of prioritizing, they’d work on more than one thing at a time—all the time. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 37 Tupalo’s Kanban board That’s not sustainable, but the time constraints of TPM and Scrum didn’t seem like they’d fit their team’s needs either. Instead, they went the Kanban route. Their project manager made a slight variation on the three status categories by adding a “deployment” category, and used color coded Post-its to assign a “class,” or value, to each task. Due dates were on red tasks only, so that in addition to seeing the whole project at once, developers could also instantly see priorities within each category. The results were huge: a reinvigorated team that saw better quality work and faster delivery times. And Tupalo still uses Kanban. ### Traditional + Agile Traditional Project Management isn’t typically used in software development, since teams prefer to be able to respond to changes throughout the development process and have more flexibility. But instead of skipping it altogether, you could combine TPM’s strengths with some Agile ideas for the best of both worlds. That’s what Panoptic Development, a software engineering agency, Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 38 has done, tweaking the traditional waterfall project management to fit their team’s needs. The project manager, Shannon Lewis, had been so used to the waterfall model that she was familiar with it’s constraints—and knew that typically, either quality, functionality or timeframes would have to be sacrificed. Panoptic Development’s take on traditional project management When Lewis started her own company, the tight budget, high- maintenance stakeholders, and unpredictable delays that a new firm brings wouldn’t allow for a rigid, traditional approach. She integrated agile practices into her methodology by blending TPM’s testing phase with Agile’s short iteration cycles. They kept their application in a state where it could always be tested, instead of completing something for delivery and then moving on to the next part. That let them be able to focus on quality while still adding function- ality they needed over time and hitting their deadlines—something neither TPM or Agile could have done on its own. Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 39 Six Sigma There are plenty of scenarios in which the job is never really done, and one example can be found in Kentucky’s recycling industry. The U.S. is the largest consumer of aluminum cans, which is why Secat Inc, a metallurgical research lab, teamed up with the University of Kentucky and the Sustainable Aluminum Industry to boost aluminum recycling rates. They chose Six Sigma because data would be plentiful—they had statistics on everything from resident demographics to aluminum recovery rates. Saving money was also priority—every time a can wasn’t recycled, it cost the local materials recycling facilities money, in addition to the costly effects on the environment. Secat’s detailed Six Sigma workflow Their strategy was to target the demographic that consumed the most aluminum, and then figure out where those people go. They identified places like sporting events, fraternity and sorority houses, and used them to spread awareness of recycling. Since the Six Sigma Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 40 methodology looks at defects—and how to demolish them—every can that went in the regular trash was considered a defect. The team then measured the emerging statistics against their base- line to determine their campaign’s effectiveness. They found several steps missing in their process (there’s the continual improvement) that they then implemented, each time improving their collection rates. The control phase focused on keeping recycle rates up, and they made sure to monitor weekly charts, using data to verify the project control. Altogether, Six Sigma fit Secat’s ongoing work, and helped them continually improve a task that typically wouldn’t seem to need project management. The Best Project Management System for You Project management may be a science, but it’s not a precise science— there’s no set-in-stone, one-size-fits-all project management method. You might be lucky and have a project that exactly fits one of these methods, or you may need to build your own hybrid system—or a brand new one, as the Apollo team did in their quest to get humans to the moon and back safely. What’s important is that you use something to manage your projects, that gives your work structure and ensures you don’t miss anything crucial. With a project management system in hand, it’s time to start man- aging your projects. But being a project manager is a complicated Chapter 2: Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond 41 job, one that requires a unique skill set that’s perhaps most similar to that of a politician. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to manage projects effectively, with tips from project managers on what they’ve learned on the job. Enjoy this chapter? Read it online or share it at https://zapier.com/learn/ultimate- guide-to-project-management/project-management-systems/. Written by Zapier Marketer Matthew Guay, with contribution from freelance writer Jane Callahan. Image Credits: Kennedy at Cape Canaveral by NASA via Flickr; GEM boxes photo via Wikipedia; Apollo 11 spacewalk image by NASA via Flickr.