Thinking Aloud...: Agile Project Management Tips

15 step Guide to manage Agile Projects

Plan for weeks or small iterations and not for months. Basically the plan for the near time should be detailed and plan for the distant future can be very high level.
Excel sheets are perfectly fine or you can use some online collaborative tools like google docs, but avoid wasting so much of time in MS Project. High level Milestone planning is however fine
Team needs to have the authority. Allow them to pick the tasks they think they can do better and they can own and deliver. The concept of assigning tasks is changed to picking of the tasks. However a word of caution, team needs to be high performing team.
The role of a Project Manager is more of a mentor and he needs to make sure that the team is performing and that there are no impediments from outside.
The work needs to be organized into smaller timeboxes or iterations and the model of the ultimate objective should be visible from very early more like the working model and not a waste pilot. So the output needs to be a workable high quality software. This shall require involvement of business on a continuous basis so that they see how it is progressing, give continuous feedback and progress.
The requirements or stories need to be finalized in the beginning and changes can happen but a given story's scope remains fixed. If there are changes from the list of the stories, prioritization is the key. Requirements prioritization is also important because it has been proved that any system which is built, only 7 to 20% of the requirements are most often used and about 15% are used only sometimes and a major 45% are never used. So the idea is why should resources be spent on building those 45% of the requirements. In the rapidly changing industry scenario, the requirements change very fast and we never come across many of the requirements. Take for example the MS word which you may be using since years. What % of Word features you may be using ? So, understanding this concept is very important when you manage an agile project.
Division of the iterations and the stories linked to them have to be planned carefully. The more the iterations, the better
A daily 15 minutes meeting should be there at start of day to talk on the achievement of yesterday the plan for today and any impediments. This meeting is not a discussion forum or problem solver meeting but more to catchup on the quick status.
At the end of each timebox or the iteration, the presentation should be given to the business so that they see the evolving product.
Burn Down Chart - It is
The estimation of the work is done using the "bottom up" methodology involving the experienced team members. A +/- 30% accuracy level is fine in the starting of the project as there is high uncertainty. As we move forward, the uncertaintity decreases and the revised estimates may be +/-10% accurate. I would personally suggest using the PERT technique and avoid any other high professional techniques like FP unless it is a large project and has history of all the FP based statistics. Another important point to remember here is that these techniques like FP, COCOMO, etc, require you to understand the requirements in details and assume that the requirements are final which is a wrong assumption for an agile project.
Expect the estimates to change as the model of the Agile is based on 'Change'. The requirements can change, reprioritize, continuous visibility to business, evolving and so does the estimates. However the final delivery date for the overall project should remain same.
Work Management - The approach is to implement the highest priority work item first in every iteration. The work management is like a stack of blocks and any item can be added or removed or reprioritized. The scrum methodology suggests to freeze the current iteration so that the developers have the stability to develop the current iteration, whereas the XP methodology allows the requirements to change even in the current iteration as long as we reprioritize and remove some other piece of requirement from the stack as it shall have our final timeline not impacted. So we need to decide which model we want to follow !
Teams use flipcharts, whiteboards, cards and various other tools to keep everyone updated of the progress and track their own work. These serve as quick reference rather than waiting for status reports. So go ahead and use them.
Burn Down Chart - It is a graphical representation in a chart showing the work left against time. The work which can be in points, or effort in hrs or any unit is in 'Y' axis and the time is represented in the 'X' axis. This chart is used to predict when will the work be completed. A sample chart is shown below.