The Agile strength of Project Management 3.0
Project Management 3.0
The Project Management is becoming more and more a key element of the success of many business realities. If the big international companies with huge projects to manage have been the first to benefit from an “engineering” of the discipline, this is not always the case for actually less structured ones.
If we think of Italian scenery, dotted mostly with small and medium-sized enterprises, the sensitivity on the subject has never been higher. In recent years, however, stimulated from one side by an increasing and competitive market and on the other by the introduction of “Agile” management techniques, the figure of the Project Manager has established itself also on the Italian scene, as a required and strategic role on the market.
Let’s analyze now the distinctive characteristics of the discipline in its most current meaning, which we could define Project Management 3.0.
Project Management in its modern variations can not ignore one of the latest and most influential organizational models, the Agile one. Currently the Agile Method aims to cover all the customers’ real needs, producing rapidly an always running product that evolves over time depending on stakeholders’ feedback; but at the same time some classic issues of project management still continue to need tailored strategies. So Project Management 3.0 wants to achieve the benefits of planning operability conducted in Agile mode, emphasizing at the same time the importance of the management of projects, declined in all its most articulate facets: from the classic control of costs and timing to the more sophisticated management of the team, the stakeholders and the product itself.
The Project Manager 3.0 is a project manager who gradually loses the typical operational aspects because – in Agile perspective – the team itself is more responsible and autonomous in determining the scheduling of “day-by-day” activities and ensuring a high quality of the product. The modern PM then, supported by a very independent and responsible team, has the ability to focus less on operational issues in order to focus on higher-level and more organic themes like strategic management (product, team, stakeholders) and planning roadmap.
The instruments
It is clear that, in the dynamic environment that characterizes the business nowadays, the management of multiple projects simultaneously, keeping track of many aspects that characterize them, requires necessarily the support of “agile” tools. This particular management is indeed a turning point in terms of work “setting”, but in practice it is realized through efficient tools that are available to manage practically the projects. Nowadays the agile scenery is dynamic and growing.
In GetConnected we have counted for years on Atlassian products in order to improve the experience of team work, project management and business planning.
Atlassian represents one of the most complete suite in providing tools for project management. Today more than 50,000 companies are using and distributing their tracking, collaboration and software development tools to make the work more agile and efficient and to achieve quality results in a short time.
Through JIRA, which is the Atlassian platform designed for the project activities tracking, we constantly develop modern and high-evolved PM’s solutions for our customers. In addition to the advanced features offered by the basic tool, we can offer to our customers an automatic orchestration between JIRA’s functionalities and dedicated add-ons (components) that, evaluating our experience on the field, we consider among the best ones in supporting the Project Management 3.0.
With current techniques, it is possible to integrate several resources in order to implement specific project needs and to obtain a customized, efficient and goal-oriented process management. Planning products of the suite Tempo (as “Time Planner” and “Timesheet”) or those of “Portfolio for JIRA“, completely connected with JIRA software, are tools that can be used to manage and schedule resources, or for an easier flushing of time.
Our own Project Monitor was created to respond to the widespread need to monitor and effectively reveal the progress of the project in an immediate and concise way. These tools allow easily having a detailed and more efficient plans, helping the team to schedule the activities in a flexible way and to coordinate the task division.
Today the Project Management’s area is the one, which is mostly influenced by the Agile philosophy, but this “agile” wave has gained strength and begins to take root also in other business contexts: it’s started, for example, to apply the Agile method to other fields like Marketing, or to the more generic Management area. In the next months, we will surely see interesting developments, the ability will be to catch the essential aspect to re-elaborate the perfect method for their own context.
