The Extreme Project Management approach

Abstract:

Nowadays, many methodologies and tools are available when it comes to project management. Some of them have been applied throughout the years but since society develops extremely fast, new approaches need to be taken to successfully handle contemporary projects. As a consequence of these modern requirements, a refreshing method that allows dealing with constant change and turbulent working environments was introduced. Being named Extreme Project Management due to its nature, it became the main recent approach utilized in project management, especially in the big software industry.

Introduction to Extreme Project Management:

In order to better understand what Extreme Project Management (hereafter XPM) consists of, we should start answering the question ‘What is Project Management?’

- What is project management?

Project management is the process of planning and organizing tasks to accomplish a successful project. Projects are one-time temporary efforts designed to produce a specific result. They differ from ongoing operations in having an end date regardless if it’s weeks or years. Project management starts when the manager develops a project charter to announce a new scope- defined project, both key aspects and risk evaluations must be carried out at this initiation stage. Afterwards, the scope, schedule, deadlines, requirements and budget for the project will be defined in the kick-off report, followed by a project control. The project control stage contains requirements, resource hours and a plan so as to help managing and checking project execution. Testing must be developed as well within regular status updates reported by the project team and managers. This stage includes the key deliverables, milestones and checklists among others. Finally, a closing report is needed to summarize the entire process methodology, findings and constraints to learn and improve in future projects. XPM is, therefore, a new project management method which includes projects with high speed, elevated change and uncertainty in their characteristics. Rather than using complex scheduling techniques and formalism; the main focus of XPM is on the human side of project management, such as managing project stakeholders. It uses the principles of human interaction management to deal with intricate human collaboration.

What is extreme project management?

For an extreme project, where the change is constant, the Head of Quarters in a company determines what is more important in the project and therefore, what should be implemented first. Splitting the project’s functionality can save time and allow to achieve an overall improvement in the testing stage since more focus is put into each part of the project. Moreover, adjustments can be made on the fly without losing control of the overall process, schedule and positive outcome of the project.

- The concept of XPM:

The project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is a collection of processes and knowledge areas accepted as best practice for the project management profession. As an internationally recognized standard (ANSI/PMI 99-001-2008 and IEEE 1490-2011) it provides the basis for project management, no matter the type of project being constructed. It supports XPM through the term ‘Progressive elaboration’, where progressive means ‘proceeding in steps, continuing steadily by increments’ and elaboration stands out for ‘worked out with care and detail, developed thoroughly’. In order to implement XPM in a successful way, several criteria has to be taken into account such as: -Project and iteration’s scopes. -Measures to ensure quality. -Business team members decide what to deliver and technical team members how to deliver so. -Corporate culture, which is ‘the ways a company's owners and employees think, feel and act’ must support XPM approach. -Trust and communication established between all members of the project team are the key. XPM methodology should only be applied during the project’s execution and change control processes instead of using it for vision, overall strategy or project prioritization. It helps including all stakeholders involved in the process in an active way.

- Description of XPM, tools and techniques:

A set of rules is defined in order to describe the XPM approach, also some tools and strategies are given to help achieving them: 1- To manage creative people and processes, innovative management processes are a must.

2- Business aspects of a project and technical issues have to be differentiated during the process, therefore the project manager must focus just on understanding the project’s organizational context. His role should include ensuring that processes are in place to achieve deliverable’s technical quality instead of reviewing the quality directly.

3- Tracking and reporting mechanisms after the project are more important than what happens during the project itself. This way, evidence of the value added after the implementation process can be noticed.

4- Key stakeholders and related projects must be identified and the planning process has to be undertaken in an open and collaborative manner among the group members. This can be achieved via RAP (Rapid Planning), a session used by XPM following the concept of RAD (Rapid Application Development). It invites disagreeing stakeholders to gather and put conflicts on the table for discussion through a participative and intensive process. What’s more, it reduces the risk of failing at the project because of the project manager taking all decisions on his/her own.

5- XPM gives more importance to the context of the project, which is represented by the business case, than the content.

6- Success sliders’ technique is used to fulfill stakeholders’ needs and expectations. It is applied to meet both budget and deadlines as well as achieve more value, quality and functional requirements.

7- Project value chain is carried out to realize and model the benefits through the model, which is based on objectives, outputs and outcomes and deals with problems in contemporary projects.

In this chain, there are two types of benefits, primary benefits that are achieved first since they are associated with the outputs and secondary benefits (after the primary ones). To accompany the model, objectives’ benefits must be listed as well following the IRACIS model. IRACIS states whether they Increase Revenue, Avoid Costs or Improve Service, enabling project sponsors to spot if the analyzed benefits are realistic or not.

8- Quality agreements are made for planning what processes are to be present during the project’s development that enhance its quality without having a negative impact on other processes.

9- Utilize project or partnership agreements where the project manager states service resources’ timing and costs to prepare a document that fulfills stakeholders and related project managers’ requisites.

10- XPM uses event/scenario/real-time planning technique to identify greater event that can occur during the project, only the tasks involved in achieving specific events are detailed and programmed.

11- The team members and the project manager have to discuss any possible changes regarding the quality, success and stakeholder’s expectations, benefits’ realization, scope/objectives, costs and risk to overcome future problems and come up with new processes within the project.

As a result of these rules and methods, extreme projects can be effectively managed since they demand refreshing and radical approaches to project management.