Addressing challenges to teach traditional and agile project management in academia

In order to prepare students for a professional IT career, most universities attempt to provide a current educational curriculum in the Project Management (PM) area to their students. This is usually based on the most promising methodologies used by the software industry. As instructors, we need to balance traditional methodologies focused on proven project planning and control processes leveraging widely accepted methods and tools along with the newer agile methodologies. Such new frameworks emphasize that software delivery should be done in a flexible and iterative manner and with significant collaboration with product owners and customers. In our experience agile methodologies have witnessed an exponential growth in many diverse software organizations, and the various agile PM tools and techniques will continue to see an increase in adoption in the software development sector. Reflecting on these changes, there is a critical need to accommodate best practices and current methodologies in our courses that deliver Project Management content. In this paper we analyse two of the most widely used methodologies for traditional and agile software development – the widely used ISO/PMBOK standard provided by the Project Management Institute and the well-accepted Scrum framework. We discuss how to overcome curriculum challenges and deliver a quality undergraduate PM course for a Computer Science and Information systems curricula. Based on our teaching experience in Europe and North America, we present a comprehensive comparison of the two approaches. Our research covers the main concepts, processes, and roles associated with the two PM frameworks and recommended learning outcomes. The paper should be of value to instructors who are keen to see their computing students graduate with a sound understanding of current PM methodologies and who can deliver real-world software products.Accepted manuscrip

Scaling agile on large enterprise level – systematic bundling and application of state of the art approaches for lasting agile transitions

International audienceOrganizations are looking for ways of establishing agile and lean process for delivery. Many approaches exist in the form of frameworks, methods and tools to setup an individual composition for a best fit. The challenge is that large organizations are heterogeneous and diverse, and hence there is no "one size fits all" approach. To facilitate a systematic implementation of agile and lean, this article proposes a transition kit based on abstraction. This kit scouts and bundles state of the art methods and tools from the agile and lean community to align them with governance and compliance aspects of the specific enterprise. Coaching of the application of the transition kit ensures an adequate instantiation. The instantiation handles business domain specific aspects and standards. A coaching governance ensures continuous improvement. An example of the systematic application of the transition approach as well as its scaling is demonstrated through its application in the Volkswagen Group IT

Success factors in information technology projects

The failure of IT projects has been a major problem over the decades. The previous study has found that big IT projects overran 45% of the cost, 7% of schedule and produced 56% less profit than expected (Mckinsey 2012). Today, the situation has not been changed significantly. It is crucial to explore critical success factors to enable software companies to avoid risks in project development across various industries. These factors should cover more organizational aspects among different customer businesses as IT projects are more challenging and diverse with a high level of novelty. The main aim of this thesis is to research organizational aspects in different software firms which can moderately im-pact IT project success and how these factors influence total project performance as IT projects have failed with many reasons over years. The study was analyzed on empirical data from the IT barometer 2014 data set of Finnish Data Processing Association. All senior managers were asked whether they agree or disagree that specified critical factors can impact on IT project success by selecting the respective scale. The study results found three of the most important factors which moderately impact the IT project success. IT architecture, enterprise architecture, and selection of IT solutions can enable software firms to gain business objectives and expected IT project outcomes during the implementation phase to meet market demands and customer satisfaction. In addition, only IT architecture and enterprise architecture can help the project team run a development project on time to gain product leadership and competitive advantages. There are other critical factors can enable IT projects to gain success in expected project outcomes during the implementation phase. In total project performance aspect, the study findings show that IT architecture can improve project timeliness better than the achievement of business objectives to gain good market share. Further, enterprise architecture has a moderate correlation with project time-to-market and achievement of business objectives to enhance project success against fierce rivalry among competitors within the software industry. The study found that the selection of IT solutions can only enable a project team to increase project competency in order to gain business objectives during development time. Hence, senior managers should consider the importance of these success factors during development phases to gain project success as expectations and improve total project performance for surpassing competitors on the market for profits and competitive advantages

Inter-departmental communication: application of lean manufacturing and as is; to be process: A case study

Three words characterize the current world in every organization: instability, uncertainty and survival. The competition is increasing every day, and the companies have to develop strategies that make them more attractive when a customer is making the decision about whom should he buy products from. Since sometimes the products are equivalent independently of the brand, a better customer service is usually a trigger point for the customer, and usually a good customer service is followed by good and efficient communication ways. The specific goal of this thesis was to enhance and create a solid and trustworthy platform to communicate between colleagues and departments, improving the customer service in terms of costs and time, and make sure that quality is guaranteed independently on the technician that does the job. This project was done at Syntegon Weert, in the Netherlands, and had as main goal the improvement of the department’s organization. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of the thesis and optimal communication ways to improve the quality provided to the customer, this work focus on the creation of a Frequently Asked Question webpage that can support the technician every time he faces a bottleneck during a project. The creation of standard procedures that guarantee that every technician act based on the same fundamentals principles which should originate similar results, as well as provide equal instructions to the customer. Also, the creation of a platform where data can be inserted in order to make the procedures more transparent, guaranteeing inter-departmental organization, facilitating the creation of standard procedures as well

Broker and Market of Resources as Organizational Mechanisms for Sustainability of Resources Selection Processes In Agile / Virtual Enterprises

Our Agile / Virtual Enterprises (A/V E) model, it is associated with the creation of temporary net of several physical organizations (or resources), with the intention to develop and produce one or more products/services, in the quantity and quality desirable, answering rapidly to a market solicitation. Our model has to satisfy four functional requirements: virtuality, distributivity, integrability and agility. The main mechanisms, or tools, for assuring satisfaction and implementation of these requirements, by the Virtual Enterprises Architecture Reference Model (BM_VEARM), are the Broker, the Market of Resources and the virtuality (as the specific organization architectural, or structural, pattern). In this paper, Broker and Market of Resources, and their roles and relationship within the process of resources selection, as one of the main processes of the A/V E as well as one of the “agility” processes, are considered. Both of them, Broker and Market of Resources, are independent physical entities, with own juridical identification, that inter-working between them and the Principal (the mentor of a business opportunity), could origin an A/V E creation. We will show in this article the main functions and its organizational position, associated to the triple Broker – Resources Market – Principal, for the A/V E configuration and operation. For the resources system selection those functions will be more detailed explained and identified its tools or type of tools, and its desired performance to assure the A /V E integrability and agility. One of these kinds of tools, are expected to be quality assurance tools, namely the value analyses.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Pmo Lite for Colorado Housing and Finance Authority

The focus of this professional project was to identify the appropriate services for a lightweight project management office (PMO) to implement at a company referred to with the alias Not-For-Profit Organization (NFPO), and then to complete the first phase of this implementation. NFPO had lower project success rates than desired. They wanted to integrate project management practices into their organization in order to be more effective in meeting their mission. In order to determine the best approach to do this, lightweight and heavyweight project management methodologies and PMOs were examined. Based on NFPO\u27s smaller staff size, their culture, managements\u27 desire to keep overhead low, and their low project management maturity state, a lightweight PMO (PMO Lite) with a supportive nature was tailored for NFPO\u27s needs. This paper presents the results of the first phase of the PMO Lite implementation, which was to implement PMO Lite within the IT division. The next phase planned was to implement PMO Lite company-wide. For the first phase a PMO Lite Project Charter was completed. This document defined the goals and objectives, as well as high level responsibilities and resources for the PMO. A primary service of the PMO was to manage a project management methodology. Next, a simple project management methodology was developed to eventually be used organization-wide for all projects. It incorporated Scrum in a separate project management methodology for the IT application development projects. Document templates and a central document repository were created. IT staff were trained on these methodologies. A business case for NFPO\u27s PMO Lite was presented. The early results of the implementation were favorable. They included executive support of the PMO, IT staff trained on the project management methodologies, and the successful completion of two Scrum projects

Proposal for shared services performance management model applied to portugueses public administration

Comunicação apresentada no 8º Congresso Nacional de Administração Pública - Desafios e Soluções, em Carcavelos de 21 a 22 de Novembro de 2011.In order to improve the quality of the services and the relationship between the central public administration and citizens the Portuguese government launched an egovernment initiative including both front and back-office processes. The implementation of shared services represents one of the transformation vectors having as major goal the gain of efficacy by reducing the organisational structures and the gain of efficiency through the rationalization of back-office processes. The main target was first the development and implementation of both financial and human resources shared services management solutions and afterwards the enlargement of this concept to other domains such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The shared services implementation target is the central public administration, which employs 550.000 workers. Depending on the success of this initiative it may be later extended to regional and local entities encompassing a total of 800.000 workers. This shared services initiative catalyzes the need of having a global public administration structure in order to provide services with the required quality and to implement adequate and flexible process oriented business models. In 2007 GeRAP, a public enterprise owned by the Ministry of Finances and Public Administration, was created aiming a suitable implementation of this paradigm. As an outcome of the financial and human resources shared services implementation experience, a Portuguese Governmental Open Cloud (GO-Cloud) project was launched with the aim of deploying an ICT public infrastructure able to integrate other private and public clouds and to offer quality infrastructure services at lower costs. The GO-Cloud overlays the double objective of establishing a technological platform that will leverage the shared services adoption spreading among public administration entities, concerning both the already deployed financial and budgetary management solution and the shared human resource management solution, and the provisioning of ICT resources and services in a more flexible and effective way. A successful implementation of shared services in a public and wide environment such as the Portuguese public administration requires a suitable reference architecture, reliable and scalable infrastructures, automated procedures, adequate management processes, an agile organization and adequate relationship models, based on a set of core competences. Thus, this paper focuses the way shared services are being implemented and managed in the Portuguese public administration, considering both the scope of this activity and the differences between public and private contexts. It 8º Congresso Nacional de Administração Pública – 2011 | Página 338 also presents the adopted service oriented architecture (SOA) and both the business model and the shared services analysis model (SSAM) used to grant GeRAP internal and external alignment. SSAM contributes with a formal analysis structure through the identification of main pillars that sustain the shared services implementation in Portuguese public administration. The defined pillars will be used as analysis vectors to create a performance model which will be able to evaluate the performance reached by shared services implementation and to anticipate some actions