Build Resilience into Any Project Regardless of Lifecycle—PMI HNL

Is your project sufficiently resilient? Without resilience, risks overtake our projects. Those risks can make you—and your team—miserable. Instead, we can create more resilient projects when we see our progress and learn. You can sidestep Murphy's Law when you organize your project for resilience.

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1. Johanna Rothman @johannarothman www.jrothman.com Build Resilience into Any Project, Regardless of Lifecycle
2. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Risks: A Fact of Life for (All) Projects • Murphy’s Law: Whatever can go wrong, will (at the worst possible time) • Hofstadter’s Law: Everything takes longer, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account 2
3. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman (Without telling us anything we shouldn’t hear, write in the chat): How are risks creating havoc with your project now? 3
4. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman How do you deal with risks now? 4
5. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Risk “proo fi ng” costs money. We need alternatives. 5
6. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Three Big Ideas • Deliverable-based planning • Frequent internal releases/demos • Frequent kaizens/retrospectives 6
7. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman 1. Deliverable-Based Plans and Planning • Many people love the comfort of a serial lifecycle • Especially accountants, because of capitalization 7
8. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman But Serial Lifecycles Don’t Work Like That • Requirements hell • Need more feedback 8
9. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Most projects need to incorporate learning as they proceed 9
10. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman If you must use phases for planning, create deliverables inside each phase and discuss those 10
11. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Examples of Deliverable-Based Plans • Instead of phase initiate or end, consider: • Login screens for search, designed, coded, and tested. Ready to release • Veri fi ed that admin logs fi t into our footprint • Heat output within spec for <these> scenarios 11
12. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman A Little Trick • Change a serial lifecycle to an incremental lifecycle 12
13. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman You Can Use Iterative Approaches, Too 13
14. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman My Favorite Lifecycle, a Combo 14
15. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Works for Hardware, Too 15
16. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman What’s Common in All These Approaches • Deliverables, not phases • (Do whatever your leadership needs, but plan and organize with deliverables) • If you meet your deliverables, no one cares how you organize 16
17. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman 2. Frequent Internal Releases and/or Demos • How many times does someone want to know “Where Are You????” • Internal releases and demos help answer that question • Requires frequent internal integration and willingness for everyone to use each other’s work • From “my work” to “our product” 17
18. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Options for Internal Releases/Demos • Demo deliverables • Build trust when you say, “We’ll demo what we delivered this past month.” • Use feature fl ags to hide what’s not done yet. • Prevents more risks 18
19. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman 3. Frequent Kaizens or Retros • Since we incorporate learning into the project, why not formalize that learning? • Formal retros every 1-3 weeks • Kaizen on demand for 20-30 minutes 19
20. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Kaizen: Continuous Improvement • On demand • On a cadence • Question: • What issue(s) do we have since the previous kaizen? • What’s our action plan to deal with it (them)? 20
21. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Retrospective • Speci fi cally for double-loop learning: • What do we need to learn about what we did? (product) • What do we need to learn about how we did that? (process) • The more we learn, the more we challenge our mental models about the work 21
22. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Deliverables and Learning Encourage Rolling Wave Planning • Choose a wave duration (1, 2, 3, 4 weeks) • Plan for that duration • As you fi nish one week, add another to the end • Always have a wave- duration plan 22
23. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman More Ideas if We Have Time • Cycle time for estimation (which allows Monte Carlo simulation) • Make the work visible (not a write- only Gantt chart, but a board of just the next few days-weeks of work) • Ask me anything because I have more ideas than can fi t into this presentation 23
24. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Links I Discussed • The “iron triangle” is missing several sides. Here’s the drivers, constraints, fl oats series: https:// www.jrothman.com/mpd/2020/02/summary-for-a-projects-boundaries-drivers-constraints- fl oats/ • There’s more about that in Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management • I use cycle time instead of story points or velocity. See https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2019/09/measure- cycle-time-not-velocity/ • There’s more about that in Create Your Successful Agile Project. • The best prices for the ebooks are here: • https://pragprog.com/titles/jrpm/manage-it/ • https://pragprog.com/titles/jragm/create-your-successful-agile-project/ • Amazon is probably best for the print books 24
25. © 2022 Johanna Rothman @johannarothman Let’s Stay in Touch • Pragmatic Manager: • www.jrothman.com/ pragmaticmanager • Please link with me on LinkedIn • An article you might like: https:// www.projectmanagement.com/ articles/682691/build-resilience-in-any- kind-of-project 25