Agile Project Management – Briefing

Presented by Laurence Archer

Adelaide

29 October 2014

9:00 am – 12:30 pm

Find out, in this complimentary 3-hour session, all about Agile Project Management,
the critical factors that make an Agile approach effective,
and the areas in which an Agile approach requires a completely different mind-set compared to how we have traditionally done IT and other projects.

SYNOPSIS

IT projects have existed since the beginning of IT, and have been dogged with problems and difficulties ever since. It is well known that the success rate of IT projects has historically been dismal indeed. But what are the causes, and how can we improve?

From the beginning, IT projects were conducted in a disciplined and inflexible way, in a futile attempt to define in detail what was required before spending any time and money designing and producing it. We eventually learned that this rigidity only served to make things more difficult for everyone involved, and also created a barrier between “The Customer” and “The Supplier”. Over time we realised that adopting a more flexible and indeed more “agile” approach helped everyone involved; it reduced the risk of delivering the wrong solution and also made it more likely that projects could be delivered on time and on budget.

This “agile” approach however required a different way of thinking about IT projects, a different relationship and stronger engagement of both Customer and Supplier, a different way of managing and empowering development teams and a more flexible approach towards requirements management and setting priorities.

In this briefing we will examine the factors that contribute towards making projects more difficult and less likely to succeed, and how an Agile approach can help address these difficulties.

We will also examine the critical factors that make an Agile approach effective, and the areas in which an Agile approach requires a completely different mind-set compared to how we have traditionally done IT projects.

Topics covered include:

• — Traditional projects vs Agile projects – What is the difference?
• — Customer/Business involvement and commitment- A different approach
• — Roles and Responsibilities – A different way of managing a team.
• — The end-to-end process – Solving a problem by successive approximations.
• — Key techniques: timeboxing, iterative development, prioritisation.
• — Critical success factor – A team and its velocity.
• — Bringing it all together – The right solution at the right time.
• — Where to from here?

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Presented by:

Laurence Archer

Laurence Archer is a leading exponent of best-practice methods for project, programme and portfolio management. He is fully accredited in AgilePM®, PRINCE2®, MSP®, Managing Benefits® P3O®, MoP® and MoR® and is regarded as one of the few top trainers in Asia-Pacific for these frameworks, consistently achieving outstanding evaluations and results.

Laurence first entered the IT Industry in the UK in 1974 and has explored most of its facets, filling roles of computer programmer, business analyst, project manager, consultant, business developer, technical director, infrastructure manager, trainer and facilitator. Whilst in the UK Laurence was two years with Oak Management Services Ltd where he undertook a study designing how to integrate PRINCE2 and the Rational Unified Process, and produced a paper entitled “Implementing Rational Unified Process within a PRINCE2 Environment”, which won the award of best presentation at the Rational User Group conference in London in October 2001.

Laurence moved to Australia in 1994 and since then has focused on developing and implementing IT governance policies and procedures, facilitating full life-cycle benefits realisation management and implementing methods and frameworks such as PRINCE2, MSP, P3O and more recently MoP, MOR, Agile and Scrum.

He has undertaken a variety of projects including developing a comprehensive PRINCE2 training program for the NSW Dept of Education and defining and planning a programme to establish a PMO for an IT Directorate based on the P3O architecture. Laurence has also worked extensively as a trainer and consultant in the private sector focusing on project management, project stakeholder management, project risk management, benefits realisation, planning iterative software development projects, effective communication for project managers.

In more recent years Laurence has actively managed a change in career focus, moving away from full-time project management towards the roles of enabler, trainer, coach, facilitator and consultant on portfolio, programme and project management.