Charting the course to agile

By Victoria Reitano

March 30, 2012 — (Page 2 of 3)

Tools can help
Mik Kersten, CEO of TaskTop (creator of the Eclipse Mylyn project), said that heterogeneous software life-cycle management systems for projects are the norm.

Kersten said he sees teams with multiple tools from different suppliers who often need an overarching management view, which he said can lead to inefficiency because each team is using a different piece of software, which often means that the metrics and charts needed for teams to assess progress need to be manually generated.

Steve Miller, vice president of ALM solutions at SmartBear, said tools should allow teams to be better at what they’re doing. “Make sure, when you’re evaluating a tool, that they are easy to use. You don’t want [team members] to stay in the tool and stop doing [their] job,” Miller said.

Visibility is what tools provide, according to Robert Holler, president and CEO of VersionOne, a provider of agile project management software. Holler said the transition to agile application life-cycle management is all about bringing better visibility to the cycle in order to help the team understand what they’re doing right and where they can improve. He said this is essential when a team is transitioning to agile because everything is moving much faster.

Chris Clarke, vice president of product management at CollabNet (a provider of agile application life-cycle management software solutions), agreed with Holler and said that a trend his company is seeing is that teams have a variety of tools that need to be integrated so that each department can see and understand what the other department is doing.

Kersten said that once teams start to think of software development projects in a “task-centric way,” it is natural for team members to want tasks displayed in an activity stream. Tasks, he said, allow teams to connect all the workflows instead of thinking of them as individual pieces of a cycle.

Clarke said a manager of a software development team needs to be able to see all the different divisions in order to make informed decisions, and for the project management office, this is hard when teams are using different tools that are not integrated.

The project management office (PMO) is a role that is necessary in the waterfall methodology, and now, according to experts, it is struggling to find a place in the new world of combined development methodologies.

Clarke said an important thing for the PMO to remember is that trends that influence business decisions are not just around products but are also trends in technology.

Forrester analysts are also analyzing the trends in PMOs and business initiatives in a series of research papers that will be published this year.

Margo Visitacion, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said PMOs need to realize that, at times, developers see the PMO team as too “heavy” in its approach.

“PMOs need to open more lines of communication and understand what types of information needs to be shared,” she said. (She recently published a research paper entitled “PMOs: Stop Being the Office of No.”)

Visitacion added that for PMOs, it is more about developing a community within the company around the methodology, noting that companies that have done this have benefited. She and Tom Grant, senior analyst at Forrester Research, agreed that it is not only an adoption of a methodology but also a change of behavior within the company. She said mentorships for all roles within the company, focusing on how agile helps each individual position, greatly enhance the effects of adoption. Success of the PMO can also be a metric used to determine how successful a team is, especially when it comes to merging an entire enterprise.

Related Search Term(s): agile, ALM

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