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 1. The Official PMI Blog


THREE WAYS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR PROJECT LIFE CYCLE USING AGILE

11 Jan 2024
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Joshua Barnes
Agile Thought Leader | PMI
Good ideas are always welcome – especially when it comes to improving project
workflows and project outcomes. In this post, Joshua Barnes shares three
approaches for optimizing the project life cycle to help you work more
efficiently and effectively.

Whether you work in waterfall, agile or hybrid, we all want our projects to be
successful and our project journeys to be as pain-free as possible. There are
many tools we can draw upon to ensure these positive outcomes and, in today’s
post, I’d like to highlight three approaches – taken from the agile world – that
I believe can enhance the life cycle of any project you undertake. 

Project life cycles, of course, are becoming increasingly complex, often
involving integration with other organizational systems and coordination of an
expanded range of risks. Many projects also call for collaboration with a
complex network of internal and external stakeholders, many of whom may have
competing or even conflicting priorities.  


APPROACH #1: PLAN IN WAVES

One way of dealing with such complexity is to adopt a flexible planning process
that balances accuracy and precision. In agile, we call it rolling wave
planning. A rolling wave plan encompasses the full scope and timeline of a
traditional plan – say for a nine-month period. But instead of trying to scope
out every element right from the start, we initially develop just a high-level
plan – what we call the release plan. We then plan in detail only for the
immediate time period in front of us.  

Initially, for example, we might break the project down into a series of
bite-size requirements or user stories. We can usually identify hundreds of such
stories in a short amount of time and organize them in some logical order –
usually by business process, user, etc. Next, we’ll identify the user stories
that integrate with other systems or that pose some type of risk or uncertainty.
We often try to do these early on to make sure they’re done right.

Once we’ve collected all these stories – our backlog – we’ll pull out enough
stories to fill roughly two weeks of work – the average length of a “sprint.”
We’ll then plan out these stories in greater detail, drilling down to the level
of specific tasks and who is going to perform those tasks. 

At the beginning of each two-week sprint, we’ll do another planning event in
which we determine and agree on the quantity of work for the next two-week
period. We’ll revisit our higher-level release plan and update that accordingly
based on our outcomes.


APPROACH #2: SOLICIT ONGOING CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

One of the significant benefits of an agile way of working is fast feedback at
all levels. By decomposing our higher-level requirements into small, independent
requirements such as user stories, we can decrease the feedback cycle
drastically. We can get immediate feedback from team members. Then, the team’s
Product Owner. From there, the Product Owner can solicit feedback from
Stakeholders and, ideally, customers. We can get much more meaningful feedback
when we can show working functionality, not screenshots or some other static
information. Working functionality that can be seen or, even better, interacted
with is a game changer.

The longest time will be from the start of the Sprint to the Sprint Review
event. However, we can do on-demand demos as soon as possible, so we don’t have
to wait until the end of two weeks.

This feedback process is far from perfunctory. We may demonstrate some of our
work and the stakeholder or customer may agree that what they are seeing is what
was asked for; however, now that they see it, they realize that it will not
provide the value that originally thought. What’s important is not only that
we’ve identified a divergence, but that we’ve identified the divergence early
enough in the process so that the time, effort, and cost of a course correction
should be minimal. Once we determine the way forward, we continue iterating and
obtaining customer feedback, making progress everyday toward our desired
outcome.


APPROACH #3: DE-RISK, DE-RISK, DE-RISK

All this input, of course, feeds back into the overarching release plan. Once
underway, for example, we might find that there’s more work involved in the
process than we originally envisioned or that the work is more complicated than
we thought. If so, we can adjust the release plan accordingly.

The other piece of this puzzle, however, is risk. As with all projects, we want
to be very thorough in identifying and managing risk. How we mitigate that risk,
however, is very different in agile because we’re not waiting for a long period
of time to test and get feedback on the risk. Instead, we often do the risk
mitigation work at the very start of the project, early in our timeline, to make
sure that it’s done early and done right. 

At the same time, we’re always on the lookout for new risks that might emerge or
become evident during our sprints and through the feedback loops. This ongoing,
real-time risk assessment minimizes the chance we’ll be caught off guard by an
un-anticipated vulnerability or that we’ll incur significant additional costs
late in the day. 

These three approaches – rolling wave planning, short feedback loops, and
pre-emptive risk management – are drawn from the agile world but can be applied
in just about any context. While they’re designed to make your project teams
more agile, when shared with project owners and stakeholders, they can also go a
long way toward building a more agile mindset and in fostering true business
agility across your organization. 

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