Ep. 27: Fatema El-Wakeel - Agile Project Management

Contact Fatema:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/fatemaelwakeelmbacma/

Fatema's Blog: https://strategicalanalytics.com/

Fatema's Articles:

• https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/may-2019-agile-project-management-in-analytics/
• https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/august-2019-further-demystification-of-agile-project-management/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Adam: (00:00)

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam Larson. And this week's episode, Mitch was joined by Fatema El-Zahraa El-Wakeel to talk about agile project management methodology. Fatema helps us understand agile by breaking down the process and giving us a simple how to, when looking to start using this project management methodology. Let's listen to learn more.

Fatema: (00:30)

So traditional project management model is really what we're used to seeing for several years. It consists of a project manager and a team of specialists who work on a project. The project team begins by meeting with the customer, can be another department or another company and external party depending on the project. And then once they collect the project requirements, they break it down into milestones. And then the project manager is tasked with keeping the customer posted on the status and completing the project. This model is really vulnerable to a lot of things like delays, miscalculations or unforeseen costs, which can be caused by the budget overruns or an overall failure to deliver a stated goals.

Mitch: (01:25)

How is the agile project management different than the waterfall method in terms of, you know, the variables that come along with the project and which methodology is better for analytics.

Fatema: (01:39)

So when you look at any project, really there are three main variables. The time set for the project, the resources that the project will be using, and the main thing is the scope. Oh, and in a traditional project management, the scope is fixed and obviously you can increase the resources by increasing the budget signing off an additional budget or adding additional employees to the project, the time needed is an estimate. People like to fix it. But normally, unfortunately you see overrun. In agile project management, the resources and time components are more fixed. While the scope is estimated. So you know that kind of the direction where you're going but it is not set on set in stone somehow. In agile because, because we are really responding to like the business needs. So we re we prefer using it in analytics project rather than sticking to a scope that is fixed. So normally what happens is a product owner, the product owner and the customer would agree on a, an MVP, which is the minimum viable product. I'm using this method. The time spent for the MVPs for each iteration is called a sprint. And at the beginning of the sprint normally the customer and the project team, agree on the sprint goals and the MVPs that are expected. And then they kind of establish a plan really to complete the work. And at the end of the sprint, the project team goes back to the customer to show the MVP and get the feedback. So they show the customer a demo of what they've done so far. Sometimes even you can go live with part of the project and launch it. And I think this is the benefit of using agile methodology in data analytics because you're utilizing the data.

Mitch: (03:41)

Now I know there are a lot of terms that I'm sure our listeners hear frequently, but may not necessarily know what they mean. So within the agile project management methodology, what are some of the most important facets and some of the terms that you should really understand to understand agile project management?

Fatema: (04:01)

That's a great question, Mitch really, because I think when you start using agile project management it's a bit overwhelming. Like when I first started i was like what are all those terminologies that people use? And what does that mean? I think few of them, well one of it is, for example the scrum and I'm a scrum is or no, those are normally regular meetings to reviews the progress of the adult project, similar to a project management manager. Oh the scrum master oversees the development process and ensures everyone is on track and it's really aligned to the planned sprints. Another term used is scrum of scrums and that happens when you have several projects, multiple teams working on different projects and they need to keep the wider team updated. Product backlog is another, term that is widely used and you can see as like list of tasks to be completed by the team, open items that the team needs to go through and kind of close in each sprint. Normally the product, owner and manages the backlog to ensure the product delivery. So he or she discusses with the, which items on the backlog need to be done. There's different like labeling, like if it's a should or could. How important is the item on the backlog.

Mitch: (05:35)

Now that we have a better understanding of the terminology that goes into agile project management, what is a practical example? Can you give us a case study or something that you've worked on where all of this kind of comes together?

Fatema: (05:50)

So let me think of an example. So, let's say a customer described some challenges with current reporting used for pricing and they explained that they would like, that's a visualization to understand relevant issues. So it's basically a visualization and analytics project. So I'm the agreed MVP in this case or the minimum viable project would be a dashboard that helps report pricing. The team working on the project agrees with the customer to me by weekly for example, and review the progress and MVPs based on expected sprint deliverables at the start. As you can see from here, the project time is agreed and it might be three months and the number of team members is, for example, set to five. So the main, the three main, um, facets, it's really of the radar project management is you have a scope, you know, the direction where you are, and in this case you're going towards a visualization project. You have the time set, which is three months, and you have the resources set, which in this case the team members, the five team members, Oh, the product owner in this case create some backlog listing the tasks needed such as tools used for the visualization, preliminary KPIs and other reporting requirements. The scrum meetings normally would occur daily and the scrum master would ensure everything is on track. A scrum meeting is normally like 10 minutes and it's a stand up. So everyone in the team would just say what they've done this day before what they're doing today. And like if there are any blockers so that in this case the scrum master would unblock those challenges that the team is facing. If you assume that at the end of sprint one the team meets with the customer to present and discuss the print preliminary KPI and the basic dashboards. So it's still the start of the project and the ...