But in a small team and you could even say small company, is this really the best approach? It does appear to be the quickest most logical way to succeed and in the end everyone can get recognition for their part.

But what if I, my friends studying bio mechanics and a market research analyst were tasked with building a rocket powerful enough to leave the earth’s atmosphere (100km+).  Who then, would be the VP of propulsion?  Who would be the VP of guidance systems?  And how do we get to our goal?  The answers over the years have included but are not limited to:

1. We can’t do it.
2. We need to hire qualified people.
3. Owners have to be assigned to each branch of the project for accountability regardless of skill.

Let’s dissect these a bit.

1. Complete disengagement, walk away, don’t even try, it’s impossible.
2. Hire someone else who will hopefully know what the hell he is doing, worse comes to worse we can blame him/her and they will either get fired or get a “get out of jail free card” for being the FNG.
3. Find someone to delegate this to so we know who to hang when the Sh!t hits the fan (this could also be represented as the anti-team member or the time trader). The allusion to the fact that everything is okay if we don’t meet our collective goal of 100km+ as long as your/his segment of the project was not the cause of the failure demonstrate total lack of interest in the actual success.

Everyone’s answer is built and prepared for failure, to assume the worse and what’s surprising is they usually fire these out in rapid order without thinking too much. Meaning they are preconditioned this way by time and experience.

Substitute the rocket by a complex problem being handled by a team that does not have the required skills to handle it properly and you will get a scenario that reproduces itself countless times per day all over the corporate world.  Look at the answers above and you will get a good idea of what is going through everyone’s mind when they initially hear that their team is being tasked with this project.  Professional boundaries do not permit them to answer as blatantly as they do in my analogy questions, however they still have a significant amount of baggage framing their thoughts this way.

Radical approaches need to be taken to change these behaviors.  New teams working on new projects may have an easier time changing where teams that have been together for years and sometimes decades might find it hard to even think this way.  Success and failure for the project should lay with the team and not its individual members.  It can all begin by substituting Accountable with Responsible (first definitions).

Thanks to Alain Wong for the video

Planbox sponsored the event by giving each team a free, one year subscription to Planbox.  And our own Olivier Cabanes, CEO and Co-Founder, acted as mentor over the 54 hours.

We at Planbox are happy and honoured to support this kind of immersive, educational experience for budding entrepreneurs.  If your start-up needs a hand with project management get in touch – we can help.

Want to know how your community can host a Startup Weekend?  Check out their website: http://startupweekend.org/

Have you ever had the sensation that your team can’t agree on anything.  Is this normal or a bad thing?  Does a better product come from friction between members collaborating?  I read an old article a while back that I didn’t particularly agree with, but it had a useful thing or two about the stages a work team should go through.  It went along the lines of forming, storming, norming and performing.  But let’s face it; most teams never leave the forming stage.  Here are a few reasons why.

1. Most people have built their careers on being the expert.  They don’t take kindly to being challenged on their knowledge and in most corporate hierarchy’s, the biggest title doesn’t get challenged…  We all know why.
2. Shifting from:” I say Jump, they say how high.” to working together is quite the paradigm shift for management and usually makes it appear like the only thing we do is talk.  Although this may seem to be the case, it is only a sign that you are spending more time up front deciding on and building something that will work.  (We at planbox would know, we just had a 45 minutes discussion on a default setting.)  However it can now be implemented in 30 minutes or less and will likely never have to be re worked or spoken of again.  The debate is over.
3. Conflicting priorities will happen; turf wars aren’t bad if you know how to handle them effectively.  You have to be able to debate and sometimes from an objective standpoint.

Ever left a meeting and everything went well, everyone agreed?  Can that be called collaboration?  Or is it just a fancy way of saying ”weekly group hug meeting”.

Going from the forming stage (the honeymoon where people get to know each other and are on their best behavior) to having a team that is not afraid to have the hard conversations with each other.  Depends on people moving away from their non-confrontational nature and not fearing managerial ramification, being labeled not a team player or my personal favorite is when a team member is said to be negative because he points out the things that don’t work and how they could be improved.

If your planning to undertaking a dramatic change in your processes such as implementing agile methodologies or just a new way to get things done.  Heed this advice, a temporary third party member to your team such as a scrum master will provide invaluable insight and traction to this transition.  They are recognized by your team as being experts in the related field.  They are sheltered from long term career ramifications that might stem from confrontation and they are zero gravity thinkers and don’t have long standing relationships that may suffer from the turf wars mentioned above.

Matthews International Corp (MATW:Nasdaq) is a 160 year old manufacturing company. In September 2011 they were looking for solutions to communication bottlenecks between their engineering teams, marketing department and management that were slowing down production. They decided to adopt an agile methodology and settled on Planbox as their primary tool.

Planbox is a software solution that isn’t limited to the IT industry. Matthews International is an example of a manufacturer of durable goods who has embraced the flexibility and strength of agile project management.

Here is their story in the words of Mike Hinds, Vice President of Technology:

“When I started working for Matthews about 8 months ago, for the most part we had no process and were in reactionary mode on most projects. And we had too many projects underway. We weren’t getting things out the door and were suffering from major delays due to lack of communication. As a fan of Scrum and with a software background, I suggested Scrum as a means to conduct day-to-day project execution. We looked at a few Management tools and Planbox stood out, quite frankly, based on price. Let me clarify that we are a hardware/software based organization, so Scrum isn’t necessarily ideal for us, but I thought with modifications we could make it work. We have 3 main locations and are a 160 year old company, so I knew that change and adoption would go slowly. The Scrum meetings were like a breath of fresh air for most of the team. We had a bottleneck at the Engineering Management level, so the open communication was much needed. We literally had products being thrown over the fence to Marketing with no warning on what was coming. We weren’t executing as well as we could, seeing that we had a very senior and talented team.

As I introduced Planbox, it was painful at first but people started to see the value. And as a data hungry executive, I could start to see everything that was underway and could start to identify bottlenecks more easily using Planbox. And Planbox was very receptive to my requests for modifications that would specifically help our organization, not that my requests were unique.

So far I am very pleased with Planbox. It’s intuitive and is a great value proposition for companies like us that are implementing Scrum as a means to conduct day-to-day operations with much better visibility, minimizing surprises and being able to more accurately synchronize engineering and marketing activities.”

Mike Hinds, Ph.D.
V.P. of Technology
Marking Products Division
Matthews International Corp.

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]]> http://www.planbox.com/blog/news/updates/manufacturing-with-scrum-agile-and-planbox.html/feed 0 http://www.planbox.com/blog/news/updates/manufacturing-with-scrum-agile-and-planbox.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/planbox/~3/bl2GKx-k58I/project-management-tool-for-students.html http://www.planbox.com/blog/news/project-management-tool-for-students.html#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:02:07 +0000 Randy http://www.planbox.com/blog/?p=2314 From inception, we wanted to build a flexible project management tool that would adapt to companies and departments that were not necessarily software development-centric. Over the past months , we’ve noticed that Planbox is being deployed by a wide variety of companies. In fact, our agile tool is being used in manufacturing, marketing, communications and many other industries.  This post begins a series highlighting how some Planbox customers outside of IT development are using our agile project management software.

Between classes, group assignments, exams and all social activities (keg party anyone?), students generally have a pretty hectic schedule. Getting organized is a priority and we’re guessing it is why so many are choosing Planbox.

While we can speculate as to why students from University of Montreal, Concordia, École de Technologie Supérieure, UQAM, Hautes Études Commerciales, and others have started using Planbox for their studies…let’s go through some of the reasons that they have given us:

• Prioritization.
  • With so many things to do across a multitude of classes and projects, it is easy to forget about an important task. With Planbox, projects can be created for each class and each assignment, item or task is prioritized by due date or criticality.

• Collaboration.
  • When working with other students on a project, students can easily communicate using the comments tool, assign tasks to others and easily accept, reject or flag items. Also, files can be uploaded to Planbox and shared with team members. Better collaboration means, better morale, no (less) waste of time and better end results.

• Breaking it down.
  • Breaking down projects into tasks is a breeze using Planbox’s 2 levels of projects, items and tasks. It turns lengthy projects into small incremental deliverables that are easier to manage.

• Sprucing up that CV.
  • Planbox helps students getting started with the tool and agile/scrum process. With the growing importance of Agile, students adding Planbox/agile experience to their CV will be attractive candidates to “agile-friendly employers”.

Because we care about education, students get free accounts regardless of the user limit. Email us at info@planbox.com for registration details.

P.S. Stay tuned for a blog on how industries such as Manufacturing, Marketing, Communications and others are using Planbox in their day to day affairs regardless of their agile/scrum knowledge or proficiency.

Agile principles have stuck

For the last couple of years many people and companies have taken the time to get informed on what agile is or even get coaching on a particular method such as SCRUM or Kanban. Even if they might not be applying a specific method at its full scale, or don’t remember all the things they learned, they do remember some of the main key agile principles:

• Iterative and collaborative approach
• Adaptation to change
• Focus on individuals
• Working software / approved concept

With these key agile principles and with the methods in mind, teams are then able to find the agile way that works for them. Information age mentions that “organizations are using Agile in all manner of different ways: more mix it with other methodologies (35%) and combine elements of the various forms of Agile (39%) than stick exclusively to one particular variant (27%).”

Agility has created new agile methodologies

Those who have fully applied an agile method such as SCRUM or Kanban, may have realized that it’s not perfect for them. And that’s ok. It’s normal that after a couple of years, people start looking back at how they’ve been working and noticing that it’s not all perfect. They need to evolve and by doing so they are being agile. That’s why we are starting to hear more and more of these: Scrum-but. Scragilefall, scrumban, waterscrum, wagile… People are taking what they’ve learned from various methods and being agile by simply keeping agile principles in their new adapted method.

Agile is getting so popular that it’s even being labeled as mainstream. Forrester research states that “in the past few years, Agile processes have not only gained increasing adoption levels; they have also rapidly joined the mainstream of development approaches. And while more organizations are adapting to Agile conventions, Agile is also adapting to the workplace. Perhaps the clearest sign of the mainstreaming of Agile is the abandonment of orthodoxy: Teams are puzzling out the mix of methodologies and combining them to fit within their organizational realities, blending Agile and non-Agile techniques and practices to create a hybrid methodology that fits larger organizations.”

IT Agile idealists might be frustrated to see agile methods being transformed, thus making things less ideal for developers. Instead, shouldn’t they be longing for it to become mainstream to have agile principles influencing other areas of the business?

The future: Agile also outside of Software?

I believe one way agile will keep evolving and getting better is by having non-IT groups adopt agile values in their work.

Mike Griffiths, wrote that “Agile adoption outside of software is nothing new–it dates back very close to the origin of today’s agile methods, predating the term ‘agile’. However, what is new and noteworthy is the rate and scale of non-software agile adoption being witnessed today. Now–as more companies than ever are exposed to agile methods in their IT practices–these methods are being employed beyond the regular IT domain.”

Also, Information Age notes that: Other organisations are even adapting Agile for use outside IT. British Airways, for example, which adopted Agile for software development in 2008, has since applied elements of the methodology in developing ideas for new revenue streams

Instead of being upset by the fact that agile principles are being altered, today’s agile practitioners should be the ones to lead the way in making agility a norm in new types of teams and organizations. That’s why Planbox has tried hard from the start to promote this philosophy, by making the tool not only useful for IT teams, but also for groups outside of software. If we all push in this direction, and try to make agile mature, diversify and solidify instead of fighting for methods to stay as they are, we’ll make sure agile thrives as a way of doing things that focuses on people, collaboration, adaptation and purpose.

So what do you think: Decline or Evolution? Let us know in the comments!

Without knowing it, the team and I had adopted an agile process. The priority list was the backlog, the specifications were the story details, and the meetings resembled kickoffs and reviews. A couple of months into this process, someone who had recently read about scrum and suggested we all get training which we all did. After the Scrum certification, we didn’t end up changing a whole lot of what we were initially doing, but we had names for what we were doing and a little more discipline.

This made me realize that the majority of people who work and need to organize themselves are “agile” without knowing it. Let’s look at what most people do to get things done:

1)      List things they need to do this/next week

2)      Get the most important things done first

3)      Scratch out things they end up not having to do

4)      Scratch out things as they get done

5)      Add more things – typically urgent stuff that pops up out of nowhere

6)      Redo a new list after a couple of days because the current one is a mess

This is really the basics to being agile. You know what you have to do, you do the most important stuff first (or not if you like to postpone!!) and end up having to do more or less than what you have planned. You set yourself some goals that you sometimes manage to hit or not. Basically, you are agile in the way to adjust yourself to what goes on around you.

I believe many teams who aren’t currently functioning by means of a specific project management method are ‘agile’ in the basic sense of the term. And they are so without knowing the ‘agile’ concept even exists. Being more educated about different agile methods such as Scrum, XP, AUP and so on, is very beneficial if you and your team are able to extract the practices you should adopt to become more effective. However, being adamant on adopting every action or activity a said agile method proclaims is a mistake. Instead, teams should take on one or a few new behaviours at a time and evaluate if what they are doing is truly favourable for them. Unfortunately, many times it’s easier to do everything as prescribed by the agile methodology and blame it when things don’t turn out as planned instead of working hard as a team to attain the agile process that works for you.

One advantage with Planbox is that it was built with that in mind; it does not impose a methodology upon you. It’s easy for individuals and teams to setup the tool to have it work how they need it to so that they are being agile best they can.

We’re building a guide to “Softly transition into Agile” if you have knowledgeable recommendations or things you’ve set in place, we’d be glad to include them in the guide.

But sometimes the drop target is not visible being offscreen above or below. The natural reflex is to move the mouse cursor beyond the view port and expect that the page scrolls. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in most browsers (except for Chrome). Yes, even the latest Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 8 don’t scroll!

So we implemented jQueryDndPageScroll; a jQuery plugin which does it for you transparently, and efficiently. To use the plugin, download the Javascript file and put it on your server. Then include it and call it as such:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.dnd_page_scroll.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	$(document).ready(function() {
		$().dndPageScroll();
	});
</script>

How it works is pretty simple. We create two transparent DIV elements at position fixed: one at the top of the page, and the other at the bottom. They are both hidden at first. When a dragstart event is triggered, they are shown (although since they are transparent, the user does not see them). When the mouse cursor enters either (bound on the dragover event), the page is scrolled. When the dragend events is triggered, the DIV elements are hidden. And that’s it!

We spun it out as open source on GitHub. Feel free to fork it and enhance it.