by Nexlogica Team | Jul 5, 2023 | Project Management
Agile project management is an iterative approach to managing software development projects that focuses on continuous releases and incorporating customer feedback with every iteration. Software teams that embrace agile project management methodologies increase their development speed, expand collaboration, and foster the ability to better respond to market trends.
But what are the agile principles that guide this approach? And how can they be applied to IT projects? In this blog post, we will explore the 12 agile principles, derived from the agile manifesto, and how they can help you manage your IT projects more effectively.
The 12 Agile Principles
The agile manifesto is a brief document that defines the core values and principles of agile. It was created in 2001 by a group of software developers who wanted to find a better way of developing software. The manifesto states four values and 12 principles that define the agile methodology and also act as best practices for agile teams.
The four values are:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
The 12 principles are:
1. Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
This principle emphasizes the importance of delivering working software to the customer as soon as possible and frequently throughout the project. This way, the customer can see the progress and provide feedback that can be incorporated into the next iteration.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
This principle acknowledges that customer needs and market conditions may change during the project, and that agile teams should be flexible and adaptable to accommodate those changes. Rather than seeing change as a disruption, agile teams see it as an opportunity to improve the product and deliver more value to the customer.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
This principle supports the idea of breaking down the project into smaller and manageable chunks, called sprints or iterations, that can be completed in a short period of time. By delivering working software at the end of each sprint, agile teams can ensure that they are meeting the customer’s expectations and that they are on track with the project goals.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
This principle emphasizes the need for close collaboration between the business stakeholders and the development team throughout the project. By working together daily, they can communicate effectively, align their vision, resolve issues quickly, and build trust and rapport.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
This principle recognizes that people are the most important factor in any project, and that they need to be motivated, empowered, and supported to perform their best. Agile teams are self-organizing and autonomous, meaning that they have the authority and responsibility to make decisions and manage their own work. Agile managers provide them with the resources, guidance, and feedback they need, but do not micromanage or interfere with their work.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
This principle advocates for direct and personal communication among team members and with other stakeholders. Face-to-face conversation allows for faster and clearer exchange of information, as well as better understanding of emotions, intentions, and body language. Agile teams use various tools and techniques to facilitate face-to-face communication, such as daily stand-up meetings, pair programming, co-location, video conferencing, etc.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
This principle states that the main indicator of how well a project is going is whether it produces working software that meets the customer’s needs and expectations. Working software is software that is functional, reliable, usable, and valuable. Agile teams focus on delivering working software rather than on producing extensive documentation or following rigid plans.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
This principle suggests that agile teams should work at a sustainable pace that allows them to deliver quality software without compromising their health, well-being, or productivity. Agile teams avoid burnout, stress, or overtime by setting realistic goals, managing their workload, prioritizing their tasks, taking breaks, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
This principle implies that agile teams should always strive to improve their technical skills and practices, as well as their software design and architecture. By doing so, they can ensure that their software is easy to maintain, modify, test, and deploy. Agile teams use various techniques to achieve technical excellence and good design, such as refactoring, code reviews, automated testing, continuous integration, etc.
10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
This principle encourages agile teams to eliminate any unnecessary or wasteful work that does not add value to the customer or the project. By simplifying their work, agile teams can focus on the most important and essential features and tasks, and avoid over-engineering or over-complicating their software. Agile teams use various methods to achieve simplicity, such as prioritizing their backlog, applying the Pareto principle, following the YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It) principle, etc.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
This principle asserts that agile teams are capable of creating the best solutions for their projects by collaborating and organizing themselves without external interference or direction. Self-organizing teams have the autonomy and authority to make decisions and manage their own work, as well as the skills and knowledge to solve problems and overcome challenges. Self-organizing teams leverage the collective intelligence and creativity of their members, and use feedback loops and retrospectives to learn and improve.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
This principle highlights the importance of continuous improvement and learning for agile teams. Agile teams regularly review their performance, processes, and practices, and identify what is working well and what can be improved. They then implement changes and experiments to optimize their efficiency and effectiveness. Agile teams use various tools and techniques to facilitate reflection and improvement, such as retrospectives, sprint reviews, metrics, etc.
How to Apply Agile Principles to IT Projects
Now that we have reviewed the 12 agile principles, how can we apply them to IT projects? Here are some practical tips and examples:
- To satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software, you can use agile tools such as product roadmaps, user stories, and minimum viable products (MVPs) to define and deliver what the customer wants in small increments.
- To welcome changing requirements, even late in development, you can use agile tools such as backlog grooming, sprint planning, and change requests to manage and prioritize changes in a flexible way.
- To deliver working software frequently, you can use agile tools such as sprints, iterations, kanban boards, and burndown charts to plan and track your work in short cycles.
- To work together daily with business people and developers, you can use agile tools such as daily stand-up meetings, collaboration software, and customer feedback surveys to communicate effectively and regularly with your stakeholders.
- To build projects around motivated individuals, you can use agile tools such as team charter, team contract, and team roles to define and align your team’s vision, values, and responsibilities.
- To convey information face-to-face within a development team, you can use agile tools such as pair programming, co-location, and video conferencing to facilitate direct and personal communication among team members.
- To measure progress by working software, you can use agile tools such as demos, user acceptance testing, and quality assurance to verify and validate your software functionality and quality.
- To promote sustainable development, you can use agile tools such as velocity, workload management, and time tracking to monitor and balance your team’s productivity and well-being.
- To pay attention to technical excellence and good design, you can use agile tools such as refactoring, code reviews, automated testing, and continuous integration to improve your technical skills and practices, as well as your software design and architecture.
- To maximize simplicity, you can use agile tools such as backlog prioritization, Pareto principle, YAGNI principle, and lean canvas to eliminate any unnecessary or wasteful work that does not add value to the customer or the project.
- To create the best solutions from self-organizing teams, you can use agile tools such as decision making techniques, conflict resolution techniques, feedback loops, and retrospectives to empower your team to collaborate and organize themselves without external interference or direction.
- To reflect on how to become more effective, you can use agile tools such as retrospectives, sprint reviews, metrics, and experiments to review your performance, processes, and practices, and identify what is working well and what can be improved.
Conclusion
Agile project management is a powerful approach to managing software development projects that focuses on delivering value to the customer through continuous releases and feedback. By following the 12 agile principles, you can apply the agile methodology to your IT projects more effectively.
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by Nexlogica Team | Feb 17, 2023 | Project Management
How to manage projects or which methodology choose to do it?
Let’s start by explaining the basic concepts related to the modern approach to IT project management. A project management methodology is a set of principles, tools and techniques that are used to plan, execute and manage projects.
How to approach effective management of IT projects? The key element is to plan the entire project, taking into account its purpose, time horizon, team and its responsibilities, as well as basic principles related to work in the project. An excellent example of planning an IT project is the use of the SMART methodology, which allows for precise determination of measurable, appropriate and achievable goals.
In addition to solid planning of the IT project, it is essential in today’s times to choose a methodology according to which work will be carried out. Currently, the literature on the subject points to many schools of IT project management. The choice of a specific methodology should be made, taking into account all the relevant factors for the organization and the culture of the team’s work.
There are several popular IT project management methodologies that are widely used in the industry. Some of the most popular IT project management methodologies are:
1. Agile
Agile is an iterative and flexible approach to project management that emphasizes collaboration, customer involvement, and continuous improvement. It is particularly well-suited for software development projects.
2. Scrum
Scrum is a subset of Agile that emphasizes teamwork, accountability, and iterative progress towards a well-defined goal. It is particularly well-suited for complex software development projects.
3. Waterfall
Waterfall is a linear project management methodology that emphasizes completing each phase of the project before moving on to the next. It is particularly well-suited for projects with well-defined requirements.
4. Lean
Lean is a project management methodology that emphasizes the elimination of waste and continuous improvement. It is particularly well-suited for projects that require high efficiency.
5. Kanban
Kanban is a project management methodology that emphasizes visualizing work, limiting work in progress, and continuous delivery. It is particularly well-suited for projects that require a high level of flexibility.
6. PRINCE2
PRINCE2 is a process-based project management methodology that emphasizes project governance, risk management, and the controlled management of stages. It is particularly well-suited for large-scale projects with multiple stakeholders.
7. PMBOK
PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) is a standard for project management that covers a wide range of project management principles, processes, and techniques. It is particularly well-suited for projects with well-defined requirements and a structured approach to project management.
Each methodology has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the choice of methodology will depend on the specific needs of the project and the organization.
Managing an IT project is a complex and multidimensional challenge. Fortunately, in the age of advanced information technology, every Project Manager has access to a vast repository of tools that facilitate and streamline the work of the entire team. Which tools deserve special attention?
First of all, communication tools that increase the efficiency of data and information flow, even in hybrid teams. Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Zoom meet all the requirements of even large teams.
An IT project cannot do without an effective tool for managing the produced code. The most popular version control system is GIT and the GitHub code repository, and these are the tools most commonly used in IT projects.
Project work, carried out by a large team, requires a tool that consolidates the efforts of all team members. The project work tool should show the status of all current tasks, the people assigned to each task, and a section for additional information within one board. Such functionalities can be found in popular tools such as Asana, Trello, or Jira.
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by Nexlogica Team | Jan 19, 2023 | Project Management
Power BI is a business intelligence and data visualization tool developed by Microsoft. It allows users to connect to various data sources, perform data transformations, and create interactive and visually appealing reports.
Power BI offers a wide range of features for creating interactive and visually appealing reports. Some of the key features of Power BI include:
- Data Connectivity: Power BI allows users to connect to various data sources, including Excel, SQL Server, and cloud-based services such as Azure, Salesforce, and Google Analytics.
- Data Transformation: Power BI allows users to perform data transformations, such as filtering, grouping, and summarizing, to prepare the data for analysis.
- Data Visualization: Power BI offers a wide range of visualization options, including charts, tables, and maps, to help users make sense of the data.
- Natural Language Querying: Power BI allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive instant answers in the form of visualizations.
- Real-time Data Streaming: Power BI allows users to stream real-time data and create visualizations that update in real-time.
- Collaboration and Sharing: Power BI allows users to share and collaborate on reports and dashboards with other users.
- Customizable: Power BI allows users to customize their reports and dashboards with various themes and custom visuals.
- Mobile App: Power BI has a mobile app version for iOS, Android and Windows.
- Power Automate integration: Power BI allows you to connect with power automate for automation of some of the data preparation tasks.
- Power Query and M language: It allows you to access and manipulate data from various sources, including web pages and databases, using Power Query and the M language.
Power BI allows you to connect to various data sources, create and publish interactive reports, and share them with others. The software provides a variety of visualizations, such as charts, tables, and maps, as well as features for data modeling, filtering, and analysis. With Power BI, you can easily create professional-looking reports that provide insights into your data.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN POWER BI REPORTS AND DASHBOARDS
Power BI Reports and Power BI Dashboards are both components of the Power BI platform, but they serve different purposes.
Power BI Reports are interactive and visually appealing documents that allow users to analyze and explore data. Reports can contain multiple pages, and each page can have a different layout and visualization. Power BI Desktop is primarily used to create Reports.
Power BI Dashboards, on the other hand, are a collection of visualizations, such as charts and tables, that are displayed on a single page. They provide a high-level overview of the key metrics and insights from the data. Dashboards can be created and edited in the Power BI Service and can be shared with other users. The main purpose of Dashboards is to give an overview of important data and insights, so users can quickly understand the state of their business.
In short, Reports are more detail oriented and allows you to dive deep into the data, Dashboards are more high-level and focused on giving you a quick overview of the most important data and insights.
Power BI is considered one of the best report tools – it is easy to use and has a friendly user interface. It is also affordable and has a free version for small business.
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by Nexlogica Team | Jul 18, 2022 | Project Management
The Covid-19 pandemic has made everyone realize the importance of digital tools and platforms. Organizations with a robust digital infrastructure were able to sustain the pandemic without facing many hurdles. Online collaborative platforms helped employees stay in touch with their peers and work in a virtual workspace.
This has resulted in more responsibilities being shouldered by IT teams within organizations. As more and more processes are carried out digitally using advanced tools, an organization’s IT infrastructure needs to be managed with utmost precision. This has made it important for organizations to focus on improving their ITSM processes.
What is IT Service Management?
IT Service Management (ITSM) is the process of delivering IT services and support to users by the IT department of an organization. These services can be provided to customers and internal employees to get their IT-related issues resolved in the best way possible.
ITSM revolves around designing, creating and delivering robust IT services to the users through digital platforms. The key difference between IT and formalized ITSM is that ITSM is used to optimize the IT infrastructure of an organization. The core of ITSM deals with providing IT as a service to the end-users and providing them with seamless support across multiple channels.
Importance of ITSM
Catering to changing needs
The needs of both employees and customers have changed significantly. They require quick and personalized IT support from an organization to get their issues resolved. Also, the increasing use of mobile devices requires an organization to set up ITSM solutions compatible with a range of digital devices. It is extremely difficult for IT teams to cater to the employees’ ever-changing needs with a traditional approach. This makes it important to implement robust ITSM tools for providing proactive support to employees.
Establishing clear connections between individual contributions and organizational goals
Implementing ITSM allows to align the IT services provided by the professionals with the goals to be achieved by organization. It gives an organized structure to the IT services provided to the customers and employees and allows to measure their effectiveness periodically. Implementing ITSM allows to streamline processes like change management, incident management, request fulfilment and more, leading to increased transparency for services delivered by IT professionals across the organization.
Implementing change management seamlessly
New technological trends are emerging, and new tools are being introduced to the market at an astonishing rate. This makes organizations change their approach to work and the tools used to carry out their processes regularly. Without effective change management, it becomes difficult for an organization to ensure that everyone is on the same page and every employee can operate the new tools at an optimum level. ITSM helps you streamline change management by providing your employees with all the required resources and materials regarding the new tools on a centralized platform.
Optimizing your collaborative platform
Over the last two years, online collaborative platforms like Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams have had immense adoption across industries. These platforms have helped organizations to operate virtually and employees to interact with their peers. ITSM allows you to optimize your collaborative platform by integrating your IT service desk with the same. This makes it easier for your employees to obtain quick IT support from their work platform. Also, the integration allows you to centralize the IT support provided to all the employees within your organization, irrespective of the department they work in.
Implementing microlearning with ITSM
Effective employee onboarding and change management require your employees to get trained in specific tools and skills. Modern IT service desks allow you to provide seamless training to your employees via microlearning. Microlearning is a modern learning methodology that involves consuming training content that takes no more than 10 minutes of the learners’ time. With the help of modern ITSM tools, you can add the training resources to your knowledge base and have your employees access the same from their respective devices. If you have integrated your service desk with a collaborative platform, your employees can get trained while working on the respective platform.
You can read more about ITSM here.
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