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Classic and agile project management

Published on November 29, 2018   27 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Welcome to this talk about Classic and Agile Project Management. I'm going to speak about some of the myths, the misunderstandings, and some facts, too. My name is Mrs. Annette Vendelbo. I'm a Project Director and Agile Specialist and I'm the founder of Xvoto.
0:17
I've been an IT Project Manager for 30 years. Ten years ago, I founded my own company, Xvoto, and since then I've been working with Agile systems, methods, and frameworks and have been digging deep into why they work and why they do not work. I'm very involved with the Project Management Institute and have been so since 1999, when I got my PMP. I have participated in the global Agile task force, where they were trying to determine what is going on in the Agile space all around the globe, and I've also been part of the review team of PMI sign up Practice Guide, which is now part of the PMBOK version six.
0:56
If we are looking at the world of project management, I guess that we can all agree that it's not a very simple world. If we divide it into four areas: the simple, the complicated, the complex, and the chaotic. If we look at the axis of technology, where we have 'close to certainty' and 'far from certainty' and look at the axis of requirements, 'close to agreement' and 'far from agreement', I hope that we can all agree that we are in the complicated, complex and sometimes, even the chaotic area. It's quite difficult for project managers to maneuver in these different areas.
1:34
Let's have a look at The Cynefin Framework, which was made by Dave Snowden in 1999. He's looking again, at the simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic area. And if we start with the simple, there, all areas are known. We have known knowns and it's possible to standardize a lot of things here. If not everything. Moving to the complicated area, we will find known unknowns. This means, that as a Project Manager, we know that we have unknowns and we also know very well where they are. This is where good practice can be made. Moving further into the complex area, this is where we find the unknown unknowns. This means that if we spend a lot of time planning, we cannot possibly plan for these unknown unknowns because we do not know when they're going to turn up. When we move into the chaotic area, it's really too confusing to count on knowledge-based answers. This means that we cannot use any practice from the other areas because we do not know what this is all about. The last domain is 'disorder'. This is where we don't really have any clue about which domain we are in. This is not a good place to be and I hope that you as a Project Manager, will not often find yourself in this situation. But, let's have a look at Classic Project Management.

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