Adaptive Project Framework
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Revision as of 16:59, 21 February 2021
Draft
Adaptive Project Framework (APF) is used in project management and is part of the group of agile methodologies. In so-called traditional project management, managers often approach investment projects as if surroundings and conditions behave in a stable way. However in modern society the volatility and the uncertainty need also to be taken into consideration in its business sector. Therefore traditional project management often does not work in new, difficult economy conditions, especially in software development. At the beginning of 21-century agile project management became widespread in science and practice. However solving the dilemmas of developing project with both agile and traditional project management became difficult and adaptive approach was invented to take advantage of and eliminating the disadvantages of both approaches mentioned above.[1] The goal of this article is to present background of Adaptive Project Framework, it's core values, how to apply the method, its limitation and then advantages and disadvantages of the approach.
Contents |
Overview
Recognised strategic leader in the field of project management, Robert K. Wysocki published the book Adaptive Project Framework in 2010, where he describes the APF approach when managing complexity in uncertainty. The AFP method was created to help teams adapt continuously to projects changing environment. This is a systematic and structured process that allows project managers to enhance their decisions and practices during the project life cycle based on learning from previous results achieved during the project. APF is designed to continually adapt to the changing situation of a project from its very beginning to its very end. Therefore, with this approach, nothing is fixed: neither the duration of the project, nor the budget, nor the risks, and everything can be continuously adjusted according to changes in the project's characteristics.[2]
To implement the APF methodology successfully, project teams must be willing to accept and adapt to changes. It is a costumer driven process, where the client is involved in every stage of the process and even given the opportunity to control the direction of the project. Consequently requires the project team to be effectively involved, acting with an open mind and trusting partnership.[3]
The APF project team is combined of client team and development team. Depending of the size of the project the client team can be a single person or multiple. In the client team there needs to be a single member in charge of the decision making, serving as a co-manager along with the development team leader. The development team is composed of technical professionals who are responsible for developing the project and producing the deliverables.[4]
A project scope is a variable from a traditional mindset and the general premise underlying an APF project is not to plan the future, the future is unknown. In APF, planning is done in each completed cycle, this is to maximise business value by adjusting the project scope of the solution and making the client a central figure. Giving the client the opportunity to be in charge of deciding what should be changed and what direction the project is heading. That means that an APF projects are constantly corrected to ensure maximum business value. When time or money or both have been used up, the deliverables will have the greatest business value that could have been generated from the collective knowledge and learning of the client team and the development team. [4]
Core Values
1. Client-focused: The most important value is that the client needs must always come first, As long as they are within the bounds of ethical business practices, the needs of the client must always come first.
2. Client-driven: Having the client to take on the project manager role and responsibilities, to give them the sense that they are determining the direction of the project and be meaningfully involved.
3. Incremental Results Early and Often: Deliverables are many and often, in an APF project, this gives the client an early delivery and is valuable when the question is what the client's real needs are. The functionality of the project's first cycles may be very limited but, in any case, useful.
4. Continuous Questioning and Introspection: This core value expresses to openness and honesty between the client team and the development team that must exist. Both sides must be committed to making the best possible business choices. Only with honest and open dialog can that occur.
5. Change Is Progress to a Better Solution: The Version Scope stage begins with the applicant and provider coming to a definition of what is needed and what will be delivered through the experience of the Conditions of Satisfaction (COS).
6. Don’t Speculate on the Future: APF strips out all work that is not value-added. Guessing only adds work back in with non-value-added. Leave it out when in doubt. APF is designed to spend the time and money of the client on business value defined by the client, not on non-value-added work.[4]
Application
Taking a closer look at the project framework, it is divided into five-phase strategy designed to provide clients with optimum business value from any cycle within the limits of time and cost constraints imposed by the client. Figure 2 shows a graphical portrait of the five phases, they consist of the project scope, the cycle plan, the cycle completion, the client checkpoint and finally post-version review. As mentioned before the APF is an iterative process and in each cycle you iterate within a cycle and also between cycles. In every cycle the development team and the client team come to a learning and discover potential opportunities to explore.[4]
Project Scope
Finally three documents are needed to finish the project scope. First, there is the Functional Requirements, that prioritises actions as well as possible risks, challenges and assumptions. As the project progresses, this may change. Second, there is the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that enables teams to estimate costs, develop schedule and break down the processes into manageable parts that need to be accomplished. Finally there is the triangle scope, which is how time, cost and quality will converge.[5] In APF, planning is done within each cycle at the micro level. It starts with an RBS-based mid-level component or function, and ends with a WBS-based micro-level activity and task. Think of this as scheduling just-in-time. If each cycle involves work that takes only a few weeks to complete,
Cycle plan
Second phase of the method is the cycle plan, once the POS has been written and an prioritised list of known functionalities that both the client and project manager agree on, that is needed to solve the business problem. A high-level planning is done to priorities the functions into multiple cycles with timeframe to be developed. A typical cycle length is around two to six week long and before each cycle the length is documented and agreed with parties along with expectations. The project is divided into multiple mini-projects or cycles, where each cycle delivers one or more deliverables. This is the iterative part of the method, that is repeated over and over again for the next three steps. The cycle plan involves defining each task that needs to be accomplished in each project cycle according to the WBS but is adapted between cycles. Order of the tasks is established, their interdependencies are identified and assigned to employees with an given deadline.[2]
Cycle completion
The cycle work begins and is monitored throughout the cycle, it can be changed as the development team work on the project. The cycle finishes when the pre-defined time elapses, and all the tasks that were not done during this cycle are reconsidered and reprioritised if they were to move to the next cycle.Every team member has daily tasks and need to post updates at the completion of each day. This allows variances to be caught at an early stage and corrective action is taken into plan. Ensuring consistent contact, noting any demands for change and new ideas for improvement is critical. They should also be discussed in the next cycle when the team encounters some problematic situations.[3]
Client checkpoint
The Client review is an important step of the process, the client team and the development team come together and review the accomplished deliverables during this cycle and evaluate the quality of the features functionality produced. Together with the project manager a plan will be conducted on any corrections or improvements to be made for the next cycle. Once the review is done then the sequence Cycle Plan → Cycle Build → Client Checkpoint are iterated until the project is complete or until the time and budget has been exhausted.[5]
Post-version review
Completion of the project, the project manager, client and the team will come to together and evaluate the success of the project and determine whether project goals have been accomplished and that the client is pleased. There are three important questions that need to be answered:
1. Was the expected business outcome realised?
2. What was learned that can be used to improve the solution?
3. What was learned that can be used to improve the effectiveness of APF?
Then document of the whole process is done to reflect the effectiveness of the method, lesson learned and possible improvements for future projects.[4]
Limitations
Focus on small teams
Agile methodologies complete projects using small releases to produce non-reusable components and these methodologies also focus on small teams because of the characteristics of face-to-face informal communication and cooperation. When a team is large, face-to-face communication becomes notably difficult, and more documentation is required, which is a deviation from the agile spirit. Meanwhile, agile methodologies characterize teams to be self-organizing according to the changing environment, which is mainly feasible for small teams and it does not work for larger teams, where more time is required to self-organise according to a change. The support for large and complex software projects is also limited in agile development assuming that refactoring will purify the code. the agile spirit holds true for small projects but becomes notably difficult in large and complex projects. agile methodologies cannot handle large projects because of the difficulty in tracking the system development life cycle (SDLC) phases of the project.
Documentation
Agile organizations to discover what types of problems are raised after implementing the agile methodologies. The survey results indicate that lack of documentation is the main problem during the maintenance and reuse of projects. Developers have little knowledge about the entire projects, which causes confusion and problems. The project team’s burn-out can result into sudden loss of valuable knowledge, which is difficult to fill without compromising cost, time and quality. Training of the new team members is another problem because of lack of documentation, and training the newcomers using a code is notably tedious.
Project Managers
ten values to be a project manager of an agile team: proactively demanding integrity of all stakeholders, building long-term relations, delivering according to the requirements, effortlessly encouraging learning, being able to define, delegate and exercise role and authority, recognizing that people are the ultimate value, encouraging talented people, fair play with customer, delivering in time result-oriented working products and building an excellent team. However, this list of ten values is not comprehensive, and a customized list per team and organization structure must be outlined.
Software development orientated
Adaptive Project Framework is not suited to construction projects as well as large-scale projects because its flexibility and iterative approach can cause delays in time and budget overruns.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages
Finish Sooner: APF brings a lot of business value to the table as compared to other approaches. APF project finish sooner than TPM projects. The reason for this is obvious. Because APF squeezes out all non-value-added work, it produces less to do than those projects that follow more-traditional approaches. The time spent planning is a good example. Linear and Incremental models plan the entire project, and then when change comes along and is approved, the plan has to be redone from the point of the change to the end of the project. That situation is repeated several times throughout a project, making much of the original planning into non-value-added work. The more changes that are approved, the more non-value-added work there will be. APF has none of this excess baggage, and is therefore guaranteed to finish sooner than traditional approaches.
Less Expensive: Non-value-added work costs money. There is at least a labor cost for the time spent planning activities and tasks that are never done due to frequent scope changes. This wastes money in the end
Better Business Termination Policy: APF delivers early and often. If anything is going awry, it will be discovered earlier than in a TPM project, giving the project comanagers information on which to decide to terminate the project before any additional time or money is spent needlessly. Some other approach using APF is needed, and the time and money saved by this early termination will be invested in the new direction.
Produces Higher-quality Deliverables: The elevated level of client involvement in an APF project means that the client will have a look at intermediate deliverables early in the project and have an opportunity to adjust them. The quality of the final product will therefore exceed
Delivers Maximum Business Value for the Time and Cost Invested: The continual adjustment and redirection of an APF project means everything that is delivered is needed and is of the quality expected by the client. The client, in collaboration with you, decides what goes into the solution at every iteration. Poorer-than-expected deliverables will not survive the APF project life cycle. If an APF project is terminated, at least you will have a partial solution with some business value.
Disadvantages
Too much flexibility: which results in a client constantly shifting his requirements because he knows that the "framework supports it". Because the client "is in charge", he can substantially change one feature, and then change it back to how it was originally.
Higher expectations: Supporters of this framework claim immaculate project results (and this is never the case), which increases the client's and the stakeholders's expectations.
Little project control: Project management is all about controlling the project and the change requests, and when using this framework, the project manager has really negligible control over the project.
Adapting the framework to the project, and not the other way around: This point is related to the previous point, when you're following an adaptive project framework, you will try your best to adapt project management to the project, and not the way around. All activities related to project management have to be unique for every project, which is not always a good thing, because often you feel yourself wandering into an uncharted territory. One more thing to add here, a PMO is meaningless when you're using this framework.
Conclusion
Adaptive Project Framework is a very effective method that enables teams to forget about the limitations of traditional project management approaches. Similarly to the traditional models, APF also includes scoping and planning phases. However, an adaptive framework allows for effective collaboration between teams and stakeholders. This way, they can adapt the project to the changing environment and quickly react to unforeseen challenges. APF is a flexible approach. When used correctly, it can also help companies minimise expenses and maximise the value proposition. Nevertheless, you should keep in mind that every project is unique, and APF cannot be called a universal approach that will fit projects of all kinds. With that said, if you’re looking for flexibility, APF is certainly the right choice.
Annotated Bibliography
http://j.mecs-press.net/ijmecs/ijmecs-v9-n1/IJMECS-V9-N1-6.pdf
References
- ↑ j. Szreder, P. Walentynowicz and P. Sycz (2019) Adaptive project framework as a development project management method on the example of the Kashubska Ostoja project. Available at: http://j.mecs-press.net/ijmecs/ijmecs-v9-n1/IJMECS-V9-N1-6.pdf .
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 David Galiana (2020) Adaptive Project Framework: an introductory guide for beginners. Available at: https://www.wimi-teamwork.com/blog/adaptive-project-framework-introductory-guide-beginners/ .
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Frank Hamilton (2021) Adaptive Project Framework: How to Implement It. Available at: https://www.startupvalley.news/adaptive-project-framework/ .
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Robert K. Wysocki Ph.D. (2010) Adaptive Project Framework. Managing Complexity in the Face of Uncertainty. Available at: https://books.google.dk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=M6GDUXXOtxsC&oi=fnd&pg=PT15&dq=adaptive+project+framework&ots=yEHeTTRqmv&sig=Jl-nX12tB_o8DMn-vYijB6R9uio&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=adaptive%20project%20framework&f=false .
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 ThinkTheme (n.d.) Adaptive Project Framework Methodology. Available at: https://thinkthyme.com/project-management/adaptive-project-framework-methodology .
