Traditional Project Management and SDLC methodology is hitting a wall. Working for a mid-size company that is reactive to very fluid business conditions means that all departments and especially IT need to work better, smarter and be more productive with less people. The traditional project management watrerfall and gated SDLC methodologies lose favor very fast when we are telling internal customers that they cannot change the 100 page requirement document without first updating a project charter, documenting a change request and then getting that change approved by a change control board. The customer throws up their hands and says this is crazy or worse silently goes through the motion to get the change in but then complains to everyone how unresponsive IT is to the business.
We have been in that boat for some time and that boat has been sinking. Even applying band aids as fast as possible by calling the Methodology "Lite", taking out steps, and reducing the pages in the documents by 25% has not kept the boat from swaying dangerously between customer demands and the PMO rocks.We need to change the boat!
It is time for a radical change and a rethink of how we delivery software projects to the customer. For a number of months in parallel to the PMO (almost as a skunk works project) a new methodology has been gaining ground in some of the project teams, This Agile, scrum like, methodology is taking root as it attacks a lot of the frustrations that the project teams have been facing from both the customer and the team. Initially, the new processes are not called Agile but are shortcuts in the process, ways of reducing, and almost hiding the Methodology from the customer. The Waterfall continues but within each waterfall step more software is being delivered earlier but not being released to production until the waterfall stage gate is complete.
Ultimately this covert operation begins to gather momentum but in doing so certain team members begin to race ahead as they gravitate to this new way of working. Other team members lag as they are not so constrained by the SDLC and so do not need to jump so far so fast. The PMO very wary about the loss of control and not understanding the role change that is happening begins to push back. Project managers on the fringe try to put their own spin on the new process to ensure that they still have control over the projects. Some customers get it , IT management sort of gets it, but the the fledgling process is close to fragmenting and dying before it has chance to take flight.
As a team we gather to perform a retrospective (by any other name) and realize that we are very close to the edge, we need to step back and understand where are we going, to understand the ramifications of the next steps. If we decide to continue then this will create major change within the department and it will be a significant risk for the leadership if we fail. Are we ready to take the leap? We have frustrated customers who want to be involved, staff who are tired of the constant change mid stream, project managers who are required to deliver many documents and Gantt charts that are never read, and IT management that has little to no visibility into how well we are doing. Surely the experiment with Agile has shown that we can begin to solve these issues but are we ready to move forward?
