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Select the most appropriate agile methodology for approaching the project for each of the five story problems. Justify your selection.
Aligning Agile Methodologies
| STORY PROBLEM | METHODOLOGY OR COMBINATION OF METHODOLOGIES | JUSTIFICATION FOR THE METHODOLOGY OR COMBINATION OF METHODOLOGIES | ||
| A specialized contracting company recently experienced rapid growth and decided to implement a project/job tracking system. Dissatisfied with the available software programs and the cost, the company decided to write its own application. The owner’s daughter, who recently graduated from college with an IT degree, has been hired as a developer and is eager to work on the project. The company’s one other developer has only one year of experience as a developer. The construction project manager (CPM) has been with the company for more than 15 years and will be the primary user of this new application. He is well known for being sensitive to requests from the owner and is prone to changing requirements often. He hired a junior CPM a few years prior and feels comfortable stepping away from his usual responsibilities to assist with this new project. | ||||
| A law firm with three partners is considering going completely paperless and to a cloud solution. This is being pushed primarily by one partner, and his challenge, now that he has been given the green light by his partners to begin this initiative, is to quickly show a strong ROI. The partners have agreed to this transition for their western region, and if he can successfully show a rapid ROI, the project will be expanded to the other 3 regions. The application they currently use is on premise (using servers located at their office) and only recently became available in the cloud. The project manager assigned to this project is very process-centric and has identified that there are two current groups of users within the law firm that would like modest updates to their application and one additional group of users who will be new to the system. | ||||
| A spring/summer intern has been hired by a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest to coordinate and facilitate a sustainability conference the last weekend in September. The intern’s budget is modest, but she has one additional fund-raising opportunity during the summer, when all items left behind by students at the school year’s end are sold in a yard sale. She will be responsible for all aspects, including recruiting volunteers, establishing registration fees, creating a conference theme, hiring main speaker/VIPs, making hotel/rental car reservations for VIPs, arranging for press releases, determining food and beverage requirements, arranging for all audio-visual needs, securing on-site staffing needs, etc. The scheduled conference date cannot slip and she already has been successful in gathering 3 students to assist her. | ||||
| A small educational software company that produces educational programs for young children has decided to launch a new division focused on the middle school-aged market. The development team is located in India. The local team at the main office consists of a project manager, a business analyst, a marketing rep, and a customer liaison that represents the customer team. One of the challenges this particular customer team has had with past projects is dealing with the amount of scope creep that tends to slide in, which causes projects to blow up and deadlines to be missed, creating a tremendous amount of stress for the rest of the team. Fortunately, the seasoned project manager is an excellent communicator, is PMI-ACP certified, and has been given the opportunity to select the project management methodology he deems best. | ||||
| The Healthcare.gov website was launched in 2013 and was wrought with issues. According to McKinsey & Co, the site suffered from poor planning from the beginning. Rather than calling for a phased approach that would have been rolled out in a weekly or biweekly fashion, the government issued a massive list of requirements and let developers work until they came back with a “finished” product. You and your company, United Skilled Modelers, with distributed developer teams all across the globe, have been tasked with replacing the website. Because this will replace the current site, the requirements are very well known and are considered quite stable. You have a team of 50 developers and more than a dozen OMG Certified UML professionals, and have heavily invested in training developers to become skilled modelers. | ||||
In the “Methodology or Combination of Methodologies” column of the worksheet, list the methodology or combination (blend) of methodologies you selected.
In the “Justification of Methodology or Combination of Methodologies” column, write a reflection (50-100 words) for each story problem that addresses the following:
What is the specific problem in the scenario?
Why did you choose the methodology or combination of methodologies? Because there is not necessarily one right or wrong answer, it is important to provide a clear justification for your choice.
Cite evidence from Appendix A or other sources in your justification.
Explain how you think each selected methodology differs most significantly from a traditional project management approach.
APA format is not required, but solid academic writing is expected.
Expert Answer
| STORY PROBLEM | METHODOLOGY OR COMBINATION OF METHODOLOGIES | JUSTIFICATION FOR THE METHODOLOGY OR COMBINATION OF METHODOLOGIES | ||
| A specialized contracting company recently experienced rapid growth and decided to implement a project/job tracking system. Dissatisfied with the available software programs and the cost, the company decided to write its own application. The owner’s daughter, who recently graduated from college with an IT degree, has been hired as a developer and is eager to work on the project. The company’s one other developer has only one year of experience as a developer. The construction project manager (CPM) has been with the company for more than 15 years and will be the primary user of this new application. He is well known for being sensitive to requests from the owner and is prone to changing requirements often. He hired a junior CPM a few years prior and feels comfortable stepping away from his usual responsibilities to assist with this new project. | The construction Project Manager, with an experience of 15 years in the company be made the project manager for this project, assisted by the team of the owner’s daughter and the IT engineer of the company.
The responsibility of this team shall be to design the set of input parameters and data, the computation that this project shall do and analyze and the output data and information that is expected from the program. The responsibility of the project team shall be to design and produce the tracking system that satisfies the needs. |
Both the owner’s daughter and the presnt IT engineer are inexperienced for the construction company expectations and results from this program.
The Construction Project Manager shall be the ultimate customer of this program. He has an assistant who can ably support the construction jobs, so The CPM can devote good amount of his time on this new project also. His presence as the team leader shall help the project to its logical end. |
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| A law firm with three partners is considering going completely paperless and to a cloud solution. This is being pushed primarily by one partner, and his challenge, now that he has been given the green light by his partners to begin this initiative, is to quickly show a strong ROI. The partners have agreed to this transition for their western region, and if he can successfully show a rapid ROI, the project will be expanded to the other 3 regions. The application they currently use is on premise (using servers located at their office) and only recently became available in the cloud. The project manager assigned to this project is very process-centric and has identified that there are two current groups of users within the law firm that would like modest updates to their application and one additional group of users who will be new to the system. | The project manager shall immediately prepare a guideline for the Do’s and Don’t’s for the users of the western region to convert their office into a paperless office in next three months.
He should also communicate to all converted a guideline and the time lines for the next three months with the online training capsules for all. He can personally, through video conferencing train 3 or 4 pilots in the western region office who shall further train all people to stop using papers in all their communications as per the guidelines. They shall also setup a procedure to convert the present data and records on papers into pdf formatted files located in the cloud. |
To convert the offices to become paperless is a risky venture and must not be taken all steps in one go.
At one side the people need to be trained and at the same time the important is the storage and safe preservation of the already available paper documentation. People should start from the first and easy step of only emails and sharing files and pictures only on cloud if Google or whatever system they have chosen. People need to get trained and used to such systems. |
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| A spring/summer intern has been hired by a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest to coordinate and facilitate a sustainability conference the last weekend in September. The intern’s budget is modest, but she has one additional fund-raising opportunity during the summer, when all items left behind by students at the school year’s end are sold in a yard sale. She will be responsible for all aspects, including recruiting volunteers, establishing registration fees, creating a conference theme, hiring main speaker/VIPs, making hotel/rental car reservations for VIPs, arranging for press releases, determining food and beverage requirements, arranging for all audio-visual needs, securing on-site staffing needs, etc. The scheduled conference date cannot slip and she already has been successful in gathering 3 students to assist her. | It is a risky proposal to hire only one intern to organize this magnitude of the jobs and an important conference for the college.
I would recommend a senior HR or administration manager of the college be made the project manager, who shall finalize the suggestions of the intern and then monitor the progress till the project execution is completed and the conference is over. |
Team of two always helps each other in resolving the issues in best possible way with a combination of ideas and discussions reaching a conclusion.
Moreover the intern shall remain so busy in so many activities that she shall be prone to some mistakes or overlooks, if she alone manages. |
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| A small educational software company that produces educational programs for young children has decided to launch a new division focused on the middle school-aged market. The development team is located in India. The local team at the main office consists of a project manager, a business analyst, a marketing rep, and a customer liaison that represents the customer team. One of the challenges this particular customer team has had with past projects is dealing with the amount of scope creep that tends to slide in, which causes projects to blow up and deadlines to be missed, creating a tremendous amount of stress for the rest of the team. Fortunately, the seasoned project manager is an excellent communicator, is PMI-ACP certified, and has been given the opportunity to select the project management methodology he deems best. | Project manager shall take up the job in following sequential steps:
Prepare a project map understanding all the jobs, the competencies required/available, dimensions of marketing, time available, training needs etc. He shall then interview each team member and explain him his role and the timelines. Prepare a schedule of the jobs and monitor the project on it. The schedule includes interim milestones, which shall decide the progress and ontime performance. |
Knowing the issue of incompetence of the team in handling similar projects they need the support, guidance and monitoring of the project manager. | ||
| The Healthcare.gov website was launched in 2013 and was wrought with issues. According to McKinsey & Co, the site suffered from poor planning from the beginning. Rather than calling for a phased approach that would have been rolled out in a weekly or biweekly fashion, the government issued a massive list of requirements and let developers work until they came back with a “finished” product. You and your company, United Skilled Modelers, with distributed developer teams all across the globe, have been tasked with replacing the website. Because this will replace the current site, the requirements are very well known and are considered quite stable. You have a team of 50 developers and more than a dozen OMG Certified UML professionals, and have heavily invested in training developers to become skilled modelers. | The need is to first map all the requirements and the issues involved in this project.
The test run of the program shall be first done with hypothetical set of input data simulating the actual performance parameters. All risk scenarios shall be considered and tested on the program. The possible test failure modes shall also be applied and tested. Then only the actual conversion shall be done. |
This is the usual method of executing such jobs which have lot of uncertainties and the risks of failure are extremely high. | ||
