When you’re leading a team who is working on digital projects (or if you are in the process of becoming a project manager), you may normally seek advice on how to manage different personalities, how to keep everyone on track and tips on how to stay sane juggling multiple projects at once. But have you ever stopped to think just how important other aspects of your company — such as the connection between project management and eCommerce — directly affect your projects?
While it might not be common for Project Management Practitioners to dive deep into eCommerce trends, the information can be more valuable than you’d think. By gaining a better understanding of what your company’s customer base is looking for as well as how they interact with your brand online, you can strengthen your current projects and ensure they meet their goals.
Say for instance you are a product manager, leading a small team to create a new product line. How can you even begin to launch a new line of products without first understanding your consumer’s sale patterns, their needs and what they are willing to pay for similar products? And while you could rely on another team to get you that information (which is the easier route by far) you will get the most value diving into the data yourself.
To help Project Management Practitioners of all kinds take the leap into research, the team at WebsiteSetup has created a Guide to eCommerce Trends that you need to know about. From industry-wide statistics to a deeper breakdown of consumer behavior both before and after the pandemic, check out the top stats below or visit WebsiteSetup for even more information.
How the eCommerce industry has changed
Before you and your team dive into your target market’s specific preferences and trends, it is crucial to understand how the eCommerce industry behaves as a whole. Though online shopping has always been popular, it has taken on a new life in recent years, surpassing previous records on an almost yearly basis. And this past year, thanks to the global pandemic, this trend has only continued to rise.
You may ask: “Why exactly do consumers flock to brands with eCommerce sites in place?”
For one main reason, the convenience. Being able to shop for what they want when they want it! It means no waiting in traffic to get to the store and no lines at the checkout counter. Plus, they can shop on their own schedule, even late into the night when traditional brick-and-mortar stores would be closed.
Another aspect of the eCommerce industry that consumers really love, is delivery. Whether through the brand directly or through a third-party service provider, consumers are almost always willing to pay more for expedited shipping straight to their door.
View these statistics to better understand how eCommerce industry as a whole, influences the market:
eCommerce sales hit $794.5 billion in 2020, which is a growth of 32% from the previous year’s sales.
During this year (2021), over 2.1 billion people are estimated to make purchases of goods or services online.
The eCommerce industry is expected to grow to over 450,000 jobs by the year 2026.
Over 95% of all purchases will be completed through eCommerce websites by 2040.
To help business owners create a website with ease, online platform use has skyrocketed in the past few years:
WordPress powers over one-third (39.5%) of all websites currently live.
From March 2020 to April 2020, the number of stores created on Shopify grew by at least 62%.
Looking Deeper into Consumer Trends
Now that you and your team understand a little bit more about how businesses operate online, lets dive deeper into specific consumer trends. While of course, your proprietary data about your own customers will always offer the best insight into how to manage your products, and the related projects, looking at consumer trends is a good place to start (especially if you are working for a new business that doesn’t have a large customer base yet).
Find the most important statistics on how consumers interact with eCommerce brands:
Convenience drives sales. In fact, 11% of consumers admitted that even before the pandemic they let convenience drive their purchase decision.
Even older audiences have mastered eCommerce, as shoppers 55 and up have moved to online shopping and say they plan to continue shopping this way.
When it comes to user experience, having a properly run website is crucial as 84% of customers say that they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.
Customers of all kinds prioritize convenience over cost, as they are willing to pay more for an easier online shopping experience.
When designing a customer service program, go with real people over bots. Studies have shown that over 65% of consumers trust a brand more if they can talk to a real person.
Delivery is important, as 98% of consumers will be more loyal to a brand if they offer these types of services. Even better if it’s free and fast!
Check out the infographic below for even more tips on eCommerce trends from WebsiteSetup!
Most of us from time to time say something (or do not say something) that we regret. Our intentions were good but our behaviour did not match up. Our good intentions were hijacked by our emotions. Often, this is stressful for us and for others. This is where our emotional intelligence (EI) and specifically empathy can assist us to manage our emotions in order to live our good intentions.
What is Empathy?
Empathy is the ability to see a situation from the perspective of others. It is understanding the feelings and thoughts of others as they experience the situation and putting yourself in their shoes.
Empathy means being there for someone, listening to them and having a sincere interest in their feelings and perspective. It is an honest and practical demonstration of their importance to you. Empathy is about connecting emotionally. In the process, we build bonds that often last a lifetime.
Lack of empathy
Why are we considering empathy? A lack of empathy affects the bottom line in companies. It leads to morale problems, disengaged employees, poor conflict handling and resulting loss of profit. Customers experiencing a lack of empathy leave. They tell everyone willing to listen about their bad experience and encourage them not to do business with you anymore. By not being empathetic, you may be seen as not caring, aloof, not respecting others and insensitive to their feelings. This may trigger feelings of anger and resentment leading to broken relationships on a business and social level. Sometimes, when your name is mentioned years later, these feelings are rekindled.
Benefits of having more empathy
Empathy helps to build long lasting trusting relationships. Seeing the world from the perspective of others helps you to act appropriately in any given situation. When you show empathy, the other person feels valued, respected and listened to. This will connect you to them emotionally. People will feel drawn to you and stay by your side. This will result in give-and-take behaviour where they will be more likely to care, listen, help and support you as well.
Empathy self-test
Consider the following statements:
Yes/No: I sometimes struggle to understand what someone else is feeling and what they might be thinking under their current circumstances.
Yes/No: I find it difficult to see things from the perspective of others or put myself in their shoes.
Yes/No: Sometimes, I am not able to feel with the other person.
Yes/No: I often fail to assure others that I am there for them and that they are not alone.
Yes/No: I am indifferent to people dealing with emotional anguish, loss and sadness.
If you answered yes to some of the above questions, you may benefit from further developing your empathy.
10 Tips to improve your empathy
Actively listen and pay attention to the other person in a conversation without being judgemental.
Focus on the non-verbal cues to understand the emotions behind what is being said.
Ensure that your body language show that you are interested in the other person’s point of view and that you want to listen (keep eye contact and do not look at your phone).
Try to understand the other person’s perspective and their reasoning behind it. Ask sincere questions for clarification.
Imagine yourself in their situation and how they might be feeling.
Watch a conversation from a distance. Try to identify what the participants are feeling
Think about friends or colleagues that in your opinion are empathetic. What do they do that makes you feel this way?
Make a list of what you can do to make people you have contact with on a daily basis feel more valued and respected.
Always be thankful and kind.
Show gratitude.
Empathy can be further developed. You must however be willing to consider the perspective of others, even if you do not agree with their view of the world. Empathy does not only benefit others. As we develop our empathy, we but broaden our perspective of the world.
This assists us in responding more appropriate in the situation when dealing with life on a daily basis. Especially in trying times and crisis, empathy will pull us through. It will help to bind us together as a team. As a responsible member of the larger community we live and work in, we will do our part and come out stronger in the end.
Prior articles in the Emotional Intelligence series:
Eben holds a Doctor of Technology degree from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, as well as an MBA degree from Stellenbosch University. He is an experienced emotional intelligence author and speaker. In addition to presenting emotional intelligence talks and facilitating emotional intelligence workshops, Eben has published articles and book chapters on leadership and emotional intelligence in local and international publications.
Contact him on LinkedIn if you need a speaker or workshop facilitator on emotional intelligence for your next team engagement.
All of a sudden, nearly overnight, huge swaths of the world’s workforce was asked to work from home. Instead of face-to-face meetings, they now had to figure out how to do all that work remotely, over online meetings. For Project and Programme Managers one of the biggest questions became: “How to lead productive online meetings?”
Challenges to overcome
Of course, we’ve all adapted, and are trying to do our best in work circumstances that may be less than ideal. Some of us had many challenges to overcome. For example:
Some may not have dedicated office space.
Some may be trying to balance a lot of family demands.
Some have children who are at home without daycare or school age children who are doing virtual learning.
Some have life partners who are also working from home.
Some have pets who may cause interruptions, or are barking in the background.
That means productivity during work time has gotten a lot trickier than it used to be. So how do you figure out what to do to move forward, to stay productive and to keep meeting attendants engaged? One good place to focus is technology. What can you put in place to strengthen this and other issues?
Kathryn Casna is a digital marketing and travel writer from San Diego, California. Customer-facing retail, hospitality, and event production make up her professional roots. Today, she runs her own writing business from whatever new locale she happens to be exploring.
Why should leaders practice kindness as a leadership strategy? And can they – really? A bit like weight training, leaders can build their compassion muscle in the brain, and have a direct impact on their team’s wellbeing and effectiveness [overall performance]. This means we all show up feeling valued, as people, in addition to placing value on the process and outcome of our project and work goals.
“Acts of kindness activate the part of our brains that makes us feel pleasure and releases a hormone called oxytocin that helps modulate social interactions and emotion. Being kind is good for our own and our employees’ mental health. And that translates to improved morale and performance.”
This quote is emphasising the need to expand managers’ toolkits by showing kindness as a leadership strategy, as well as offering some good simple tips for giving attention to being kind.
There are endless benefits of kindness in our interactions at work relating to wellbeing for effectiveness. More than ever, there is an evidence-based need for kindness as stress levels impact mental and physical health of leaders and teams. Think burnout and psychosocial stressors that are ongoing and unchecked when relationships at work are destructive, even if not overt, in addition to the current stresses during this time of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Kindness is an ACT and not a STATE
My thoughts on kindness in this context immediately connect to the recent references to character in leadership in the acceptance speech by elected Vice President Kamala Harris where she quoted the late John Lewis as saying ‘democracy is an act and not a state’. Kindness is just that too, an act and not merely a state of being. Kindness needs to be demonstrated through our behaviour and relationships with others.
“The Human brain is set to detect threat signals in an automatic and unconscious way. Due to evolutionary reasons, these ‘automatic’ paths get priority. Therefore, growth and change do not happen by chance: it has to be carefully focused on to be triggered.”
The BONUS for leaders positioned more on the continuum of task vs compassion is that kindness can be developed and learnt!
For the sceptics there is evidence-based research and scientific data that shows:
We can change our thoughts, our behaviours, and our ability to thrive in this world by adapting [learning] in ways that result in physiological changes in the brain known as neuroplasticity where new neural pathways are formed and hardwired. Coaching is a powerful way to integrate learning and change, helping to reinforce good practices through actions that support positive behaviours.
The good news is kindness can be taught and ingrained through practice by developing the compassion ‘muscle’ in the brain. When kindness is experienced, this reduces stress and raises the right neurochemicals in our body-brain system to inspire us to move forward to achieve goals and growth.
Developing hard skills that were previously referred to as ‘soft skills’, relate to the human factor such as empathy, compassion, collaboration, communication, a coaching-based leadership approach, etc. These hard skills touch on EQ [managing my emotions] and SQ [managing others’ emotions] and make a difference to all aspects of performance, organisational wellbeing and effectiveness – for people and teams.
Sustained change and growth can be achieved. Empirical research by Richard Boyatzis and associates shows how more powerful results for sustained change is accomplished through coaching for compassion [like positive coaching-style approaches and processes] vs coaching for compliance [ensuring people meet certain behavioural requirements]. What this means for leaders and teams is to focus on people development vs people management as a more effective leadership approach.
I conclude on developing and demonstrating a strategy of kindness with a connection to the bigger picture and aligning with our global collective sustainable development goals.
“In many ways, acting out of kindness is a way to protest the present trend of pursuing happiness by increasing personal consumption and trying to capture as much as one can for oneself. Kindness – the word that is missing from the 2030 Agenda – might be the only means by which we can achieve our goals!”
I invite you to connect and commit to acts of kindness in leading yourself and your team to experience a healthier and more meaningful and fulfilling work life.
What can you do differently in this next week?
About the author
Mandy Carlson of ‘Carlson Coaching and Consulting‘ practices as coach, change consultant, and learning facilitator. She is a certified Results Coach through Neuroleadership Institute as well as an accredited coach through Neurozone, and recently studied through Coaches Rising. Mandy is constantly learning through studies and practice of contemporary neuroscience findings, systems thinking, positive psychology, and more. Mandy has an honours degree in organisational psychology and a background in organisational development (OD). She is passionate about empowering teams, leaders and individuals with simple tools to learn and bring about lasting change for wellbeing and effectiveness.
Whenever large-scale organizational change is planned and managed by executives, project managers are on the front lines of incorporating those changes. Most employees don’t enjoy the prospect of undergoing large-scale organizational change, especially if it will impact them in any way.
Organizational change is ultimately implemented to make things easier, more efficient, and to improve financial results to enhance the company’s future. Organisations implement changes for a number of reasons. This could include topics like cultural awareness and acceptance, where many companies are taking large-scale initiatives to make workplaces more inclusive. Other reasons for change would be a desire to break into a new field, an overall change in a company’s mission, or implementation of new technology with the goal of streamlining communication.
Many large-scale changes often mean many labour hours being spent on training and changing, rather than work and generating revenue. This could lead to differing opinions from members of the C-suite on why, how, and even if these changes should be occurring. With that in mind, the responsibility falls on the shoulders of project managers to determine what the actual final verdict was regarding the organizational change, and incorporate the same techniques utilized in workflow management into the organizational change management.
Just as some C-suite executives will scoff at certain organizational change requests, many employees will do the same, unfortunately making the organizational change management that much more difficult for project managers. Taking of the gloves might be needed, especially if the organizational change management has been clearly put on the Project/Program Management team (including a Change Manager). If you find yourself in a position of having to lead change, taking a look at this comprehensive guide on Organizational Change Management can prepare you for success in your difficult-but-achievable situation.
The Organisational Change Management Guide cover important aspects; like what Change Management is, why it is important, planning strategies for Change, who needs change and examples of successful and failed transformation cases. This Guide is an excellent read and reference.
During 2020 many people started working from home, remotely, as a result of Covid-19. It happened fairly quickly and quite seamlessly, thanks to the technology we have at our disposal.
Now, in 2021 when most people are returning to work after a Christmas holiday break, the remote working arrangement is continuing due to the fact that the Pandemic is far from over.
It will be interesting to see if the remote work arrangement will continue when things do return to normal one day, or whether it may become a permanent arrangement, perhaps following a hybrid approach where employees may continue working from home 2 or 3 days a week.
With this trend, it is very beneficial for employers and managers to ensure teams have home offices that enables high productivity.
Find below an Infographic covering the rise of remote work, the challenges people experience with that and details of office accessories to help with success.
When you come from a traditional project management background to Agile, there are a few guidelines for becoming a successful Agile Project Leader. Enjoy the tips in the video below.
The purpose of this article is to give you a summary of the changes in The Scrum Guide 2020 that was released on 18 November 2020 by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. These changes were made with input from the community of Scrum users around the globe. This updated version helps bring Scrum to all industries and organizations. The 2020 Scrum Guide also includes updates to several major elements of the Scrum framework.
What hasn’t changed
Scrum is still a lightweight framework to solve complex problems and deliver value. Scrum is still about a cross-functional team of people collaborating closely with one another and their stakeholders. as a team, they create valuable and useful increments every sprint.
What has changed
There are a number of changes in the Scrum Guide.
It’s less prescriptive, simpler language is used and software-specific terminology has been removed
changes to some definitions, e.g., scrum definition, empiricism, product backlog, sprint goal, sprint backlog, increment, definition of done
elements added or their relationships clarified, e.g., the “commitments” product goal (new), sprint goal and definition of done
the concept of a development team within a scrum team was removed to reduce the potential for dysfunctions between the product owner and the development team (“us vs. them”) and focus the entire scrum team on the same objective
a scrum team now consists of the product owner, developers, and the scrum master. the people doing the work of creating a usable increment are called developers
the “entire scrum team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful increment every sprint. The developers are accountable for all aspects of creating the usable increment
the terms “accountable” and “responsible” are used more consistently, and “roles” is replaced by “accountabilities”
the scrum guide now uses the terms “self-managing” and “self-management” to emphasize that scrum teams choose “who, how and what to work on” whereas the scrum guide 2017 used the terms “self-organizing” and “self-organization” to describe that development teams chose “who and how to do work”
the term servant-leader was removed, and scrum masters are now described as “true leaders who serve the scrum team and the larger organization”
sprint planning now has three topics: “why is this sprint valuable?”, is the new first topic
the purpose of events is clarified and the description how to conduct them is less prescriptive
a “product goal” is introduced, serving as a target and describing a future state of the product
it is clarified that multiple increments can be delivered within a sprint, even prior to the end of a sprint. sprint review is not a gate to releasing value.
Get your copy today
To download the latest copy of the Scrum Guide 2020, click here. You will also find a series of articles, blogs, videos and more that pertain to the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide released on November 18, 2020.
Recently I was involved with setting up the Governance guidelines for our Agile Delivery Framework at work. I realized that many Agile Project Leaders would benefit from a break-down of the what, the why and the how of governance on Agile projects, especially in an enterprise organization.
Definition of Governance
There are a few good definitions for governance in an agile context. I liked the following ones.
“Governance is the alignment of an initiative (project, programme or product development) with organisational goals to create value. Governance defines how the initiative is set up, managed and controlled. Agile governance is the application of Lean-Agile values, principles and practices to the task of governance.”
Disciplined Agile (DA)
“Agile governance is a process that projects or programs apply to ensure that projects are aligned with the needs or expectations of their stakeholders as well as ensuring that delivery of such projects while adhering to the existing protocols consisting of lean-based agile principles and practices that are applicable in agile-focused projects or programs.”
“Governance establishes chains of responsibility, authority and communication in support of the overall enterprise’s goals and strategy. It also establishes measurements, policies, standards and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out their roles and responsibilities effectively.”
The following principles are recommended by Disciplined Agile for effective governance in agile:
Collaboration with delivery teams is more effective than trying to force them to conform. IT professionals are intellectual workers, the type of people whom are more likely to do what you want when you work with them to do so rather than tell them to do so.
Enabling teams to do the “right thing” is more effective than trying to inspect it in. One examples would be when you want developers to follow common coding conventions. Instead of doing code inspections, it would be easier to adopt a code analysis tool such as CheckStyle and include it in your continuous integration (CI) strategy.
Continuous monitoring provides more timely insight than quality gate reviews. Team dashboards that use business intelligence (BI) technology to display real-time measures generated by the use of your development tools have become very common in the past few years. This enables both the team and their stakeholders to monitor the team’s progress in a continuous real-time manner. This is much more effective than traditional “quality gate” reviews of artifacts because the information displayed on the dashboards is automatically generated.
Transparency into teams provides better insight than status reports. Through application of strategies such as information radiators, team dashboards and active stakeholder participation, the work of a disciplined agile delivery team is effectively transparent.
Axelos.com also provides four guiding principles to enable successful governance of Agile delivery
Governance should mirror the Agile manifesto principles, particularly the art of simplicity – maximizing the work not done is essential
Agile delivery teams decide on the empirical performance metrics they will use and self-monitor. Teams quantify their performance and use the data to improve. Teams display progress status information visually, updating it frequently. This makes progress transparent to everyone including senior management.
Collaboration is an essential change in mindset. As drivers of strategy and direction, senior leadership champion the implementation of an agile culture for the whole organization. A transparent culture surfaces issues or blockers without fear of blame. Good agile governance and by extension successful organizations share knowledge, collaborate and remove barriers that foster organizational silos. Delivery teams are therefore given an environment, workspace and tools to collaborate, self-organize and deliver.
Independent reviews of Agile delivery should focus on the teams’ behaviours and practices and not just processes and documentation. When using Agile, the mindset for the organization is to adapt the governance, assurance and approval processes, and to consider different indicators of success. The usual principles of assurance remain but assessment relies more on observation and engagement with the delivery team and stakeholders, rather than reporting and information reviews.
In conclusion Axelos is saying that agile governance is about defining the fastest route that brings the most value.
Why Agile Delivery Governance?
A good agile delivery governance strategy will enable and motivate IT delivery teams to do the following.
Fulfill your organization’s strategies and objectives
Regularly and consistently create real business value
Provide appropriate return on investment (ROI)
Deliver consumable solutions in a timely and relevant manner
Work effectively with their project stakeholders
Adopt processes and organizational structure that encourage successful IT solution delivery
Present accurate and timely information to project stakeholders
Mitigate the risks they face.
How Disciplined Agile Teams Are Governed
DA recommends strategies that enable delivery governance. These strategies are: (my summarized view)
Enterprise awareness. Agile teams need to realize that they work within your organization’s enterprise ecosystem, as do all other teams. There are often existing systems in production that should not be negatively impacted by the release of the solution they are working on. They will work with other teams in parallel, striving to leverage each other’s work. They will work towards your organization’s business and technical visions. Enterprise awareness is the underpinning of effective governance.
Release planning. High-level release planning happens early on when you identify and think through any dependencies on other teams and try to identify a reasonable cost and time estimate for the current release that they are working on. The high-level plan is kept up-to-date as development progresses, and shared with stakeholders. Release planning enables the team to answer critical governance questions regarding projected schedule and cost.
Team dashboard. The tools used by your team should be instrumented to record important events when they occur. For example, your team management tool could record when a work item is defined, when work begins on it, when the work is validated (if appropriate), and when it is marked done. This sort of information can be recorded in a data warehouse and later reported on using business intelligence (BI) tooling via a project or portfolio dashboard. The real-time, accurate information radiated by a team dashboard enables the team to make better decisions and provides better transparency to stakeholders (including governance people).
Information radiators. An information radiator is a visible display that shows something of interest to a team or their stakeholders like a whiteboard with an architecture sketch on it, or a wall-mounted monitor showing the team’s dashboard. Information radiators enable better governance by increasing transparency.
Active stakeholder participation. Active stakeholder participation is the practice of having on-site access to stakeholders, or at least their proxies (i.e. Product Owners). Active stakeholders have the authority and ability to provide information and make timely decisions regarding the prioritization and scope of requirements. This enables more effective governance through improving the team’s access to decision makers.
Demos. Typically, at the end of each iteration, teams which follow Scrum, will demonstrate the solution to key stakeholders and invite feedback. This practice is also called stakeholder demonstration or sprint demonstration. This enables effective governance by increasing transparency and providing better opportunities for stakeholders to steer the team.
Coordination meetings. The team meets daily, to coordinate their activities. This practice is often called a scrum meeting or daily stand up meeting. This enables tactical governance within the team itself through increasing internal transparency and reducing the feedback cycle within the team.
Light-weight, risk-based milestones. Effective reviews are as simple and short as possible. A small co-located team will spend an hour walking the PO and business stakeholders through whatever is to be reviewed. For larger efforts this could be up to half a day in regulatory environments more time and effort need to be invested, particularly around creation and baselining of artifacts to be reviewed and recording of action items from the review.
Retrospectives. A retrospective is a facilitated reflection meeting performed by the team, with the goal of identifying potential areas of improvement, supporting your overall governance goal of continuous improvement.
These strategies support a light weight approach to governance while improving the overall effectiveness of the team.
Governance Practices and Principles
Finally, an International Journal article published in sciencedirect.com summarised Agile practices and principles to be followed for Governance as follows.
Ensure value driven delivery – use end solution orientation
Ensure stakeholder engagement
Boost team performance practices
Establish a transparent collaborative work environment
Utilise adaptive planning
Welcome changes throughout the project
Employ problem detection and resolution
Employ continuous improvements in products, people and processes
Conduct Value Measurements by considering strategic objectives, metrics, targets and savings.
Agree Agile metrics to be used on Portfolio level as well as on Program and Team level
The focus is on delivering outputs and results, rather than tasks and milestones. Strive for simplicity – bring just enough process and documentation, while keeping a constant balance between rigidity and responsiveness of methods, processes and tools.
In conclusion it seems that agile teams are significantly easier to govern than traditional teams as a result of greater transparency and accurate and timely development data.
This year, the world has undergone a vast remote working experiment. Although some companies had already introduced this option for their workers, COVID-19 drastically accelerated the levels of remote working out of necessity.
So has the experiment been a success? What are the pros and cons of remote working?
The Advantages of Remote Working
Let’s start with the advantages of remote working.
For the employee, there are wide range of benefits that include:
Greater work-life balance. Rather than working rigid 9-5 office hours, with a potentially punishing commute further consuming the day, remote workers can work from a location of their choosing. With less time spent commuting, they can fill their day with more personally rewarding activities – whether that’s spending time with the family, going to the gym, or simply relaxing at home.
Saving money. Whether it’s a rail ticket or fuel for the car, commuting can also cost a lot of money.
Improved focus. Formany workers, a noisy office is not the most conducive working environment. In one survey of UK workers, 68% felt they were more productive or equally productive at home.
There are also benefits for employers, with some of the most significant being:
Greater productivity and a more engaged workforce. Happy and healthy workers are also more productive workers. It’s not surprising that remote workers’ enhanced levels of wellbeing can lead them to work more effectively too.
Lower costs. The cost of running an office for five days a week can be substantial. Whether businesses implement remote working full-time or part-time, they will end up saving some money.
New talent. A remote working setup allows businesses to seek talent from further afield.
The Disadvantages of Remote Working
Although remote working undoubtedly has many benefits, there are naturally some downsides that need to be considered too. Although video conferencing with colleagues is great for work purposes, it’s far from ideal for socialising. It’s difficult for more than one person to talk at the same time, and so group chats can descend into incoherent chaos. Face-to-face communication is important for the social culture and togetherness of a company, and remote communication is not quite able to fill the gap – yet. In future, of course, it could be that new virtual reality technology will improve matters here.
For the individual remote worker, too, this isolation can become depressing. It’s important to guard remote workers’ mental health, and ensure that they still feel involved as much as possible. Although remote working has some definite upsides for mental health, the potential downsides should not be ignored.
Many businesses have been historically wary of introducing remote working, but the experiment during the pandemic has dispelled some of the misconceptions they might have had. Remote workers do not slack off, but continue to work productively – and some studies even suggest those who work at home are actually moreproductive.
For the workers themselves, working from home can be something of a mixed blessing. Many have celebrated the improved work-life balance and wellbeing that remote working has brought them, but there are signs that remote working full-time can start to take its toll. Others have experienced increasing isolation – craving the social atmosphere of the office.
It may be, of course, that the right balance lies in the middle ground – remote working a few days a week to improve wellbeing, but also benefiting from office socialising. In general, however, it’s clear that the remote working experiment has been largely successful: opening up new horizons of possibility for employers and employees alike.
More great resources
Working from Home Guide
Please find below an in-depth guide on creating a healthy and productive workplace for people working from home. This is very useful since many are still under COVID-19 lockdowns. It will help you gain an understanding of the biggest challenges faced by remote workers dealing with stress, anxiety, and maintaining work-life balance at home.
Your home and your wellbeing: how to achieve a work-life balance while working from home
This guide offers helpful insights:
65% of people value a good work-life balance as the most important factor when looking for work.
As of April 2021, 31% of workers still worked remotely for the majority of the time.
The proportion of people working remotely varies hugely between sectors. In the Information and Communication industry, 81% of the workforce is remote. In contrast, just 8% of Accommodation and Food Service employees work remotely.
As of December 2020, there were 22% more people who worked from home in rural areas than in urban areas.
For more helpful information about:
Changing attitudes and behaviours to work-life balance
Tips on how to adjust and be more productive when working from home
Red flags that you’re not managing work-life balance well
How working from home affects your mortgage
How to achieve a work-life balance while working from home
Most project management professionals are aware of the project management trend of the accelerated shift from Waterfall to Agile Project Management as the only way to deliver on benefits in a dynamic and complex environment in order to learn and adapt quickly.
When project managers find themselves moving into agile due to this shift, what does it mean for the careers of these professionals?
For one thing, project managers will have to transition from following the typical traditional life cycle on projects to an agile approach like Scrum as an example of one of the most popular approaches.
Furthermore, on agile project the triple constraint changes from having a fixed scope with time or cost being variable/ negotiable, to scope/feature being the variable part that will be negotiated, based on the needs of the customer.
Daunting Journey
This can be quite a daunting journey and puzzling to highly experienced project professionals to position themselves as an Agile Project Manager or an Agile Project Leader. There are a multitude of agile frameworks in the new paradigm to increase organsiations’ agility. Most project management professionals will find it challenging to get into that space where people can follow your lead, like they have been for years.
Quite often people will feel like they are starting from scratch. There is this long journey of having to adopt an Agile mindset, to go for Agile training and possibly become certified in a new role, and then to become completely familiar and competent with the Agile principles and practices that need to be followed daily.
How the Project Manager role is changing
Project Managers need a different mindset and be practicing the values and principles of agile. PM’s need a working knowledge of agile frameworks and how to best apply them in your organisational context. They need to apply new tools and techniques and let go of being centre of coordination.
As a facilitator and coach they need to build collaborative decision-making environment. And in the Leadership space, they should focus on people rather than process.
Challenges during the transition
As part of the change there are things that we need to stop doing and start doing. Both are equally hard to do.
Agile is fast paced, disciplined and demanding. In high-change projects, there’s more complexity than one person can manage. Instead, cross-functional teams coordinate their own work and collaborate with the business representative PO. PM are accustomed to being at the centre of coordination for a project, while tracking and representing a project’s status to the rest of the organization. This will need to shift from being the center to serving the team and management.
As agile project leaders there is a change in emphasis to coaching people who want help, to foster greater collaboration on team, and to encourage improved team performance due to the inspect and adapt approach.
The agile project leader needs to align stakeholder needs. Ensure appropriate engagement of all stakeholders, as the Product Owner (PO) is not always correctly positioned or skilled to do so. It’s really important to be very effective in stakeholder engagement to remain valuable. It doesn’t matter what you are called as long as you are clear about how you fit into the totality of project responsibilities.
Focus on the outcome (rather than output) and on what needs to be done to achieve client acceptance. Use judgment in aligning your approaches to the demands of the project. It undoubtedly means that project managers, must adapt our roles to the context.
Other Research Perspectives
Based on agile guidance from the Project Management Institute (PMI), it is said that each project is unique and that project success is based on adapting to the unique context of the project. Determine the most appropriate method to produce the desired outcomes.
Tailoring the approach is iterative and it will be a constant process throughout the project lifecycle. Depending on the project, objectives and stakeholders, use just enough process to achieve the desired outcome, while maximising value, managing costs and enhancing the speed. Tailor with a holistic perspective of the business environment, the team size, the degree of uncertainty and the complexity of the project. Then discuss and agree as a team on the best delivery approach and resources required.
Furthermore, it is good to remember that a Certified Project Manager (PMP) or other qualified project management professional is one of the most highly trained and skilled knowledge workers in the organization. Reducing the available pool of knowledge workers as an asset is highly questionable. Smart organizational leaders find ways to include everyone who can contribute to the overall success of developing products and services that meet customer demands.
Trained Project Management professionals are equipped with key characteristics:
Leadership,
Influencing
Team building
Motivation
Communication
Facilitation
Decision making
Political and cultural awareness
Negotiation
Trust building
Conflict management
Coaching
You can be confident about what it is that you bring to the table with your skills and experience.
Options in Agile
There are multiple agile frameworks to choose from, but one of the most popular is the Scrum approach and in an enterprise organization, it will need to be scaled.
Scrum has very defined roles like the Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master (SM). You will find an overlap between PO and PM:
Both concerned about projects meeting their objectives
Negotiating work with teams
Managing scope, time and budget
Managing stakeholder communications
Similarly, there is an overlap between the roles of the SM and the PM, namely:
Leadership
Excellent communicator, facilitator
Conflict Manager
Analyst & lateral thinker
Content knowledge
People’s person
Enabler
In the corporate enterprise environment where all three roles are often present on strategic Programmes, you’ll see a distinct difference in terms of the focus areas and responsibilities.
A Product Owner
The PO is concerned about the overall scope and he’s responsible for the product backlog prioritization
The PO is responsible for the quality of delivery from a User Story acceptance, Definition of Done (DoD), sprint and release perspective.
The PO needs to know about the Release status and is involved with Scrum events like backlog refinement, end-of-sprint review and demo as well as sprint planning (what is required).
From a financial perspective, the PO is part of the Cost management and responsible for benefit realization.
Scrum Master
The SM’s concerns are the sprint goal and sprint backlog, as well as sprint prioritization.
The SM looks at the velocity of the team, driving delivery.
The SM is responsible for scrum events like the Daily standup, sprint planning and retrospective.
For status the SM looks at daily status (updates on tool), sprint status
Risks and issues management from the perspective of helping to remove impediments, blockers.
Project Manager
The PM will look at the overall agile project life cycle and is responsible for compiling a Conceptual Sprint Plan (CSP) view of the project.
The PM will look at Release planning and integration aspects within the project, as well as with external projects and vendors or stakeholders.
PM is still involved in many meetings like Steercom, Scrum of Scrum (SoS) and Change Control
The PM is concerned about overall status feedback to the Steercom and the Project Management Office (PMO).
The PM is responsible for risk and issue management and escalations.
The PM does Cost management – planned/forecasts and actuals.
Project Manager & SM combined
Another option is where people have combined the role of a PM with that of a SM in the context of a consulting company serving customers, while fulfilling both roles on some projects or just the PM role on other projects.
Source: Shama Bole – plastergroup.com
Project Manager in SAFe
Based on another source: PMI Conference Paper by D Cornelius, PMI Global Congress, Oct 2014, the Paper evaluated the PM role using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) practice. Since SAFe includes portfolio, program, and project levels, it provides the best opportunity for the PM to use the skills obtained from PM training. It will fulfill the role as Release Train Engineer (RTE). In this context the PM is also seen as a coach and facilitator.
The same Paper describes a trend where the PM practice is accepted as a key desired management skill and it moves project leadership from a specialized role back to the functional managers responsible for day-to-day operations. Project management is also one of the key courses required of students in MBA programs to ensure future business leaders obtain the knowledge to plan and execute projects. The elevation of project management as a key knowledge area for business leaders also will play a role in the reduction of the PM a specialized role.
The Paper concluded that the certified PM is a highly skilled knowledge worker that is capable of adding value in a lean and agile world, some-one who will participate effectively in enterprise agile organizations.
When a PM is deployed in a Scrum-only environment it limits the PM’s choices to participate as the Product Owner, a Scrum Master or a Scrum of Scrum Master (scaled).
The SAFe landscape provides the best opportunity for the professional PM to use their skills obtained from PM training. In Scrum @Scale, there is a Scrum of Scrum Master which could also be a good match for PM skills.
The PM is expected to lead by influence without authority. In the lean and agile world, the PM must become a servant leader which is only difficult when previous experience has been a command-and-control model, but In my opinion not so much if your leadership style was more facilitative and adaptive based on the context of the project. An agile PM provides a value that enables continual learning and improvement to members in the organization.
What Agile Project Leaders need for success
You need to work on growing skillsets beyond your area of expertise.
You need to tailor delivery approach based on the context.
It will be very valuable if you can coordinate between different systems, methodologies while coaching the teams in a singular direction.
You need to delegate control of detailed product planning and delivery to the team.
Focus on building a collaborative decision-making environment.
Ensure teams have the ability to respond to changes.
In an adaptive environment, you will use adaptive planning.
High emotional Intelligence with a focus on people rather than process.
Stakeholder engagement continuously and appropriately for the project needs.
Changed Leadership styles calling for situational and servant leadership.
You can transform yourself to become an agile project leader by knowing what your options are and by deciding where is the best fit based on your strengths, experience and value-add. Commit to continuous learning.
You will enjoy a stimulating work environment while your needs for variety, being autonomous and a change-maker are met.
Let us know what you think about the transitioning of project managers to agile?
As a Project Management Professional and Agile Practitioner, the startup of a new project is one of the most important activities to lead. There is a good chance that if you start well, you will also finish well.
How do you start an Agile project if you are working in an enterprise organization with a mix of projects ranging from the traditional plan-driven (waterfall) projects to agile projects to a more hybrid agile approach?
The purpose of this article is to provide you with guidelines for starting an agile project as an Agile Project Leader. It is based on my own experience as a professional project manager who has made the transition to following an agile approach.
Hybrid Agile
Let’s first clarify what I mean by a hybrid agile approach. Hybrid agile approaches typically combine traditional (predictive) and agile elements. Whereas a blended approach combine two (or more) similar approaches. So, using a combination of Scrum and XP is a blended agile approach since they are both agile to begin with.
According to Mike Griffiths, in his article on Projectmanagement.com, called “Flavors of Hybrid Agile”, he explains that the goal of combining project approaches is to create something better suited for our current environment than using either a pure agile or pure traditional (predictive) approach. He promotes the argument of being smart about the tools we use and to choose the best approaches for the circumstances we face. I have to agree with being pragmatic about this and to apply our efforts where we have the most influence. In the end it’s about the results.
Agile Project Lifecycle
One example of such a hybrid agile approach that I have worked with before, is below.
You start with a phase called Inception and in the case of a really large program, there will be pre-work, sometimes called the Pre-Inception. As expected you will do analysis, developing, testing and deploying in every iteration during Development . You still do development, testing and test automation in every sprint, but instead of releasing to production, you will release to a test environment (sometimes called Acceptance).
You then have a phase for testing that a new solution will work end-to-end, called Stabilization. This is usually applicable in an IT environment where the new solution (system) needs to integrate with multiple existing applications. In normal Agile, a test iteration at then end, is also called a ‘hardening sprint’.
Once the end-to-end testing has been completed, it will be followed by user acceptance testing, also known as UAT, where end-users will test actual business like scenarios to ensure that the new solution is performing as expected. Only when UAT is signed off, the solution is deployed to production during the Deployment phase.
During the Inception phase, you will review the Business Case (in the case of a formal strategic project), confirm the scope, plan for the project (sprints), ensure team members are trained, elaborate the requirements and establish the infrastructure plan, including hardware, software and various environments to work within (development, testing and production environments).
Startup
Typically, there needs to be a Project Kick-off workshop where the Product Vision and Scope of Work is shared with all the stakeholders. On a high level the business requirements, the in scope work, the key stakeholders as well as the agile approach are presented.
Next is the Release Planning where the conditions of satisfaction are agreed, for example the expected timeline for the project, the scope including the Product vision and roadmap, the epics (and user stories), as well as the budget.
The release plan activities will include agreement on the scope, in other words which epics and user stories will deliver the scope. Next you want to gain consensus on user story estimates. Then you need to determine the team’s capacity for completing the work. The activities are explained very well in this picture, adapted from ‘Mike Cohn – Agile Estimation and Planning’
If you are used to looking at a project planning as a process, it will look something like this.
The Team
Another important step in the startup process, is the Team Formation which will consist of several onboarding activities.
With each team that will be part of the project, you want to develop a Team Charter in which the project team’s vision, the objectives, and the team member roles and responsibilities are covered. The team also needs to develop a Working Agreement to agree aspects like:
Whatever agile approach has been decided on by the Management and Development teams, as fit for purpose based on the context of the organization, it needs to be documented as a process and explained and agreed with the overall team members.
The Tools
One thing that my experience has taught me, is that you need sufficient tools to support your agile process. Many people love Excel, but it certainly won’t be enough. Although it could be a good starting point, there are people who like to export data from electronic systems and use Excel to track the progress of the work. Try to stick to one system that will be the single source of truth, especially if coordination is required among multiple Development teams.
The tools can be as simple as physical white boards with stickies, so that the work in every sprint is visible and the stickies can be moved during daily standups. Impediments can also be clearly indicated so that action can be taken.
The tools can also be electronic task management systems with ‘whiteboards’ that allow for backlog refinement and boards that will make the work visible for teams to share and discuss. There are multiple good tools available in the market today and it’s up to the organization to find a tool suitable for their needs.
Ready, steady, go
At the end of Inception phase, the backlog will be ready and in a healthy state. This means that User Stories are adhering to the INVEST principle (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable), they have acceptance criteria, estimates and meet the Definition of Ready (DOR), based on what was agreed for them to be ready.
The Product Owner(s) will work with the teams to prioritise the work and it will be an ongoing refinement process before every sprint. Feedback will be provided and based on the inspect and adapt principle of agile, there will be continuous improvement in every sprint.
This is a very short synopsis of what it entails to start an agile project successfully. The aim is to give guidance and to provide a logical sequence of steps to be taken. As always, every project is unique, every organization is different, and as an Agile project leader you need to take your context into consideration to decide on the best approach for your situation.
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