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The paper is based on the case analysis of “using agile project management on mobile application development”. Being the project manager of the organization, it is required to meet the requirements of the project. The project is basically comprised of the developing and implementing Android and iPad based mobile applications for getting continuous updating of marketing efforts to the managers and executives. The application would be helpful to ensure the effectiveness of the marketing campaign. The project deadline is 3 months and weekly project assessment is critical for project success. The project is been managed from the side of 10 team members located at three different locations. 3 developers are centered in India, 2 Quality Assurance testers reside in San Francisco and rest of the team members and product owners are in Herndon, VA. Managing long distant relationship is creating serious issues in managing project properly and causing certain ethical issues, communication issues, quality issues, planning issues, project delays, team conflicts, and deadline issues. The paper consists of the study of the agile project management framework suited for this project and the project plan based on the proposed framework including major milestones, resources, tasks, and dependencies. The agile techniques and tools will be proposed to manage the project ineffective way. The fundamental strategies will be formulated to conduct the requirements sessions and manage multiple tracks on daily basis. The vital techniques will be determined to manage the conflicts. The monitoring and controlling tools and techniques will also be recommended. The contrast of agile methodology and traditional project management methodology will be represented to justify an agile strategy in a particular situation. Quality control techniques and project closure will also be explained at the end.
Various models can work well under the agile umbrella such as Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, Bimodal, Hybrid etc. The selected agile project management framework for this project is the Scrum framework. The framework is based on four basic steps. In the first step, the entire work scope is broken down into short cycles of development. These short development cycles are also called sprints. The second step is to define the duration of each sprint. Duration of sprints can vary from one to four weeks. The third and most critical step is to ensure the team development according to the plan. A strict work plan must be developed and assigned to the team members so that they can rely on it and perform their work according to the plan for each sprint. The fourth major step is to specify the predefined roles for the project so that team member can work upon the project to fulfill their assigned roles.
The Scrum framework will be going to follow an underlying framework. The project plan will be based on the Scrum framework. The project plan is based on three phases. The First phase is based on setting three major roles. The first role is scrum master who is the main figure to track the project, eliminate the obstacles and ensure the work efficiency. In the above scenario, one of a group leader or project manager will be selected from 10 of the team members who can lead the project and perform the role of scrum master. The second role is the product owner, who is basically the stakeholders and customers of the project who can provide feedback over the products of the project. The project owners in the case are the marketing executives and marketing team of the company who need to use the mobile application software in future to ensure company marketing campaign effectiveness. The project outcomes will be delivered to satisfy the need of the company marketing team. The third one is the scrum team which is a cross-functional team of the project. In this scenario, the scrum team is composed of 10 members who include two developers, two quality assurance (QA) testers and remaining members are product owners and project team. The members are expected to remain flexible in order to attain desired outcomes.
The second phase of the plan is based on the planning of three artifacts of the project. Sprint is the basic unit of the scrum which is a short development cycle of the project. The deadline of the project is 3 months in this case, so the short development cycle of the project will be based on equal three sprints of 4 weeks (Hu, Yuan & Zhang, 2009). Means each sprint goal should be accomplished within 1 month to produce a product in a finished form. The first artifact of the scrum is “the project backlog” includes the list of feature items that are required to convert the project in the final product. It can be updated with new requirements, features, fixes and other changes. The second artifact is sprint backlog which includes the list of tasks required to be completed by the end of each sprint. The team must be agreed to accomplish this list of tasks. Tasks list include planning, development, testing, review and extended review. The third architect is the sprint burndown chart which includes day to day progress of the project and predicts that whether the goals of the sprint will be accomplished on the decided time or not.
The third phase is to ensure “scrum meetings”. The four components of meetings include daily scrums, sprint planning, spring review, and retrospective meetings. The first component is daily scrums which must be a formalized task like daily scrums in which the team set the next 24 hours to plan of tasks. In the underlying scenario, this meeting can be conducted on teleconference or video conferences (Schwaber & Beedle, 2002).
The second element is sprint planning which requires the participation of the development team, scrum master and the project owner once in a month for planning sprint for at least eight hours in one sprint.
Next element is a sprint review in which the informal meetings will be held to plan that what to do next to enhance the value of the product. It must be four hours meeting in one month sprint. The last element is a retrospective meeting to reflect the work of team members during each sprint and find the ways of improvement. The positive changes can be held for the next sprint planning. Three hours session of review can be conducted.
Figure 1: Milestones Resources Tasks Dependencies
Following are some agile techniques and tools that will be used to manage the project.
The first one is to create high priority to provide customer satisfaction through continuous and early methodology in order to create valuable and meaningful software. Secondly, welcome the changing requirements in the project without any interpretation of timing to achieve the development goals of the project. The changes will be taken place which will be meaningful and significant to achieve competitive advantages. Thirdly, frequently deliver the development of the app within a couple of weeks through the software implementation within the preferred and shorter timescale. The fourth technique is collaboration and cooperation of personnel and developers throughout the project in order to minimize the delay in project milestones accomplishment. A fifth technique is to motivate the individual members of the team to create a supportive environment in order to accomplish the tasks. Face to face communication is more effective to convey information which is quite difficult in the current scenario because different team members belong to different locations. But the communication can be taken place through online tools such as video conference, Skype etc. another critical tool for creating an efficient implementation of scrum framework is to implement the updates software and measure their progress as primary sources for application development. It is also important to develop the relationship between the users, sponsors, and developers to make project processes efficient. For example, the project report will be frequently updated to take sponsors confidence. The user’s feedback will also be taken frequently to bring the necessary changes so that developers can put their constant efforts to improve the project processes. Continuous attention is required toward the technical excellence and design of the apps. Simplicity is another technique to eliminate the waste of time on unnecessary work. Self-organizing teams and their regular reflection over their work is another important technique to improve the effectiveness (Moe, Dingsøyr & Dybå, 2010).
The fundamental strategies are to adopt the daily scrums, sprint planning, spring review, and retrospective meetings. Fundamental strategies which will be utilized to conduct the requirements sessions and manage the work multiple tracks on daily basis include the following:
Multiple tracks of work can be managed on daily basis through the daily scrums which are used to manage the formalized tasks on daily scrums. The team set the next 24 hours to plan tasks. In the underlying scenario, this meeting can be conducted on teleconference or video conferences. The daily scrums will be managed to discuss the next 24 hours plan and ensure the accomplishment of daily based targets. It will help to limit the process delays. The second element is sprint planning which requires the participation of the development team, scrum master and the project owner once in a month for planning sprint for at least eight hours in one sprint. Next requirement session is a sprint review in which the informal meetings will be held to plan that what to do next to enhance the value of the product. It must be four hours meeting in one month sprint. The last element is a retrospective meeting to reflect the work of team members during each sprint and find the ways of improvement. The positive changes can be held for the next sprint planning. Three hours session of review can be conducted.
In the current scenario, the team members are facing conflicting situations. The developers have the complaint with analysts that they are not performing the analysis in a broad sense. The QA testers have complained about the late documentation which is causing the issue in the testing process and so on. These are some issues which have been causing conflicts. One of a vital technique that can be used in this situation to manage the conflicts and facilitate collaboration is “cognitive analysis approach” prescribed by Al-Tabatabai and colleagues. According to this approach, the main sources of conflict between the team members are the cognitive differences among the team members. The approach facilitates a continuous provision of feedback to provide the analysis of each individual team member judgment and the comparison of these judgments with their counterpart’s judgment. The analysis of the feedback provides the cognitive insight to the interest of conflicting parties and provides the opportunity to reach the acceptable resolution of the team conflicts. A systematic methodology is used to measure their cues, judgments and distal variables and determine the relationship between the variables. The cognitive analysis approach based on six-step methodology is as followed:
The first step is to identify the conflict domain. Secondly, the conflict cases will be generated. For example, the first one is the case of developers who have the complaint with analysts that they are not performing the analysis in a broad sense. The second case is QA testers complain about the late documentation which is causing an issue in the testing process. Late documentation will cause a delay in testing and delay in project planned schedule which will cause a conflict of interest between team members and sponsors and so on. These are some issues which have been causing conflicts. After identification of conflict cases, the next step is to exercise of judgment which includes cognitive analysis of each party assessment over the conflict. The next step is an analysis of result in which project leader analyze each party perspective in conflicting case and analysis of necessary cases and situations where conflicts resolution is critical for success. The fifth step is to communicate the cognitive feedback and judgment differences to different parties of the conflict. The communication will make them aware of others perspectives. The last step is a negotiation where the parties of conflict will make aware of conflicting party’s perspective and make them realize of understanding their own lags. When conflicting parties can understand the differences among their personal judgment and judgment of other parties, they will be able to reach the point of negotiation and ready to listen and understand another perspective in order to compromise on a situation which would be necessary to accomplish project targets on time.
Two examples of the techniques are as followed:
Firstly, the analyst and developers’ performance will be compared with their expected milestones in order to see who is not able to meet their deadline tasks. Their performance can be compared in order to make them realize about who will be a delay. In this way, instead of claiming negatives over others, both parties will be able to realize their point of errors and can reach in particular situations. The second example is the case of QA testers who have complains of late documentation which is causing a delay in the testing process. Documentation delay can be easily overcome as compared to testing delay, so timely provision of the document should be a priority of team members supervised through project head in order to ensure scheduled tasks and flow of documentation on timely bases.
One of a major issue which needs to be closely monitored is to evaluate the crashes the developing team should know about the information of technical nature and crash might be occurred which should be timely trigged. Hockey App is a significant app which can be used to find out the root causes for the bugs identification. For example, identify the bug in specific device type and in a specific OS version. The app is also effective to go on the bug tracking system integration with the Mobile processes.
Second possible issues are performance issues that can be monitored through technical performance identification app. The tool named “Prometheus” is vital for tracking the actions in the system and finds the areas which need to be optimized. The tool is effective to quickly look at the issues and report it. Prometheus help to store time series in local disk and memory in the custom format (Cervone, 2011). U The app measures that the operations are simply operating and alter manager about the silencing and notifications to maintain dimensional information. The app also allows ten languages for the easy instrumentation of services to support the custom libraries and allow third-party data exporting for integrations in order to review the process effectively.
If the same project will be managed through traditional project management approach such as waterfall project management approach, it will handle the predictive planning and evaluation at the product lifecycle end. Under the traditional approach, a single project manager is responsible for the monitoring activities of personnel, risks, scope, and cost. Comparatively, the agile project management needs the coordination of project master, product owners, and the remaining team members to work in an informal environment to serve the users. More flexibility is found in agile technique as compared to traditional waterfall technique. Hence, teamwork is highly promoted in agile technique as compared to traditional approach which inculcates more flexibility in agile strategies. Hence, desire results might not be received by using a traditional project management approach.
The quality control is very important in this scenario. The QA testers are facing the issue of delayed testing. The root cause of this issue is the late provision of documentation. The analyst is also creating an issue in analysis process which is further creating an issue for developers. Bugs and crashes may result in the development process of the app. In such case the prevention over inspection is necessary. The Cost of Quality (COQ) is the tool which will be used to measure to deal with the issue and measure and control the quality (Schwaber, 2004). COQ is the money spent to deal with the project issue and fix any failure. It includes the cost of conformance and nonconformance. The conformance cost includes the cost involved in documentation, training, equipment required, testing and inspection cost to get the quality work.
The non-conformance cost related to the internal failure costs such as cost to bring process from scrap entirely, warranty work, cost come from liabilities and lost business. Manage quality to reduce the nonconformance cost and spend appropriate money on conformance cost provide quality processes (Sutherland, Viktorov, Blount & Puntikov, 2007).
Another tool for continuous improvement is Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma. These tools address the improvements by continuously documenting the issue and monitoring the tasks and learned the lesson from operation failure to ensure more efficient project operations in the future and do not repeat the mistakes.
The project closure method is based on five steps:
First of all, the whole team will be invited for feedback. It will be a post-mortem stage. The second step is complete paperwork. The documents are prepared and completed and signed off by the stakeholders. The contract with the internal partners and legal proof of the project will be retained. The document will include the outstanding payments and all invoices’ records involved in the project include the information about the paid and unpaid amounts of the project. Once, the project is been done, all the resources would be blocked for the project team members according to the contract. So that resources should be assigned properly for the next project. Before the closeout of the project, the important notes and documents will be archived so that it can be used at the time when it is needed and can be learned from the old issues. In the end, the success will be celebrated and will learn from the failures. It will be the step where the team morale can build.
Agile project management technique is more effective compared to the traditional project management approach. Scrum approach is effective in agile project management in the case scenario as it has the opportunity to provide a flexible framework to create well-communicated techniques and conflict resolution options and also capable to provide quality assurance.
Cervone, H. F. (2011). Understanding agile project management methods using Scrum. OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, 27(1), 18-22.
Hu, Z. G., Yuan, Q., & Zhang, X. (2009, July). Research on agile project management with scrum method.In Services Science, Management and Engineering, 2009.SSME’09. IITA International Conference on (pp. 26-29). IEEE.
Highsmith, J. R. (2009). Agile project management: creating innovative products. Pearson Education.
Moe, N. B., Dingsøyr, T., &Dybå, T. (2010). A teamwork model for understanding an agile team: A case study of a Scrum project. Information and Software Technology, 52(5), 480-491.
Schwaber, K. (2004). Agile project management with Scrum.Microsoft press.
Sutherland, J., Viktorov, A., Blount, J., &Puntikov, N. (2007, January). Distributed scrum: Agile project management with outsourced development teams.In System Sciences, 2007.HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 274a-274a). IEEE.
Schwaber, K., &Beedle, M. (2002). Agile software development with Scrum (Vol. 1). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
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