Primavera Gets Agile
Primavera is a software product of the Primavera Systems, Inc whose aim is to provide solution that allow companies to prioritize, plan, manage, and measure their customers’ business and services. Previously, that is before adopting the agile software, Primavera made use of the traditional waterfall model whereby the Product Marketing Department was responsible for requesting projects and would later plan then and develop them over a lengthy period of about nine to twelve months (Schatz, & Abdelshafi, 2005). Delivering of the finished product was made to the customers at the time promised which however was quite cumbersome to meet the deadline. There were numerous changes that needed to be made every time a given project approached its deadline which increased the probability of errors. The programmers undertaking the given projects were forced by circumstances to work long hours in an attempt to solve the emerging defects. Another problem that Primavera faced was alienation of the stakeholders from the mission of the development team. There was no development process that had been put in place where the stakeholders would be involved mainly due to the fact that Product Management had not achieved the goal of seeing a finished product to the end. The expectations of the shareholders therefore grew more and more distant from the mission of the development team. Project managers made use of the command-and-control philosophy where decisions were only made by those that were furthest from the action. The developers at work were not involved in the decision making which led to the diminished interactions between the development team and other departments. The biggest challenge that Primavera was facing involved finding new strategies that would facilitate the efforts towards product development that would meet the changing demands of their clients. Primavera was forced to be more flexible, and responsive to the changes which resulted in the implementation of agile strategies.
Despite working long hours, the release of the final product was not satisfactory to the customers where most of them felt that the release did not have the required features and was characterized by usability problems. There was need for primavera to adopt more flexible technologies that contained the features that could accommodate the changing market demands. Primavera also needed to involve everyone within the development process in order for the whole team to work on the same objectives.
For the transition to agile strategies to be effective, Primavera requires a willing party that will be ready to invest towards the transition. The party has to be ready to face critics and at the same time offer encouragement to leaders and effectively communicate the vision of the team. One of the steps that has to be followed is making use of objective coaching. An outside source would be very helpful in providing an honest and objective feedback regarding the nee approach. Coaching should help to facilitate a learning culture within the company where the team would get an opportunity to try out the new techniques after learning about them and assess areas that would require improvement. Second step would be focusing on teamwork through team building activities that will help to facilitate a team that can manage itself. Managers can be able to easily delegate duties to team and be sure that the task will be performed. This aspect will help the managers to shift their focus to more delicate issues such as team dynamics. It is important to encourage the development of a team that is devoted to give its best in terms of performance. Thirdly, Primavera should make use of the agile language that already exist. Altering the agile language to suit the culture of the organization may cause errors during the implementation of the agile technology. The agile language is different and unique which forces the users to think and reason differently which helps to facilitate creativity. To avoid thinking and behaving in the old ways, primavera should encourage the use of the agile language and avoid making any changes to it. The fourth step Primavera should consider is about getting executive support. Agile makes use of the bottom-up leadership approach which means that the implementation of any significant changes would require the support of the executive members. With executive support, it is possible for the team to carry on with the learning process despite the existence of constraints (Gustavsson, 2016). The fifth step would be to avoid working overtime as the agile technology provides users with a sustainable environment that allows the development process to be carried out at a considerable pace. The sixth step would be to learn how to negotiate and set expectations which allows the team to gather feedback and to work with other developers outside the team (O’Connell, 2014). The last step would be the ability to detect troublesome areas and the managers should be willing to offer positive reinforcement to encourage the team to stay in a learning mode.
Primavera resulted to settle for the Scrum process that comprised a set of principles of project management that were based on small cross-functional teams that were self-managed, 40-hour work weeks and 30-day iterations (Kapitsaki, & Christou, 2014). Despite the success of the implementation, there were a few challenges that were encountered during the first attempt. One of the problems was an increase in the number of bugs and many of the features despite having an impressive functionality wee not in a shippable condition. The team had to withhold the development process to fix the bugs with an aim of stabilizing the product which was both time and resource consuming (van et al., 2018). The other challenge resulted from focusing on short-term deliverables and ignoring long-term deliverables. There was not enough metrics regarding the expected completion date of the project which denied the stakeholders an opportunity to evaluate how much work was yet to be done.
The scrum environment enabled primavera to measure the quality of it products and the time it took to be delivered to the market unlike the previous methodology whose deadline was cumbersome to beat. There was a 30 percent increase in the quality of work delivered since the adoption of the agile methodologies as seen from the reported defects. The decline in the number of defects enables the company to focus on the content of the next release. The owners of the product are able to align with the changing demands of the market.
The team was able to work at a considerable pace that eliminated the possibility of working overtime. The developers were able to work together as a team which included taking up roles that were outside their area of expertise resulting in a more enjoyable and conducive work environment and consequently, higher performance results were achieved. The teamwork between the developers was extended to the product owners which has resulted in a better understanding of the business value.
References
Gustavsson, T. (2016). Benefits of agile project management in a non-software development context-A literature review. In Fifth International Scientific Conference on Project Management in the Baltic Countries (pp. 114-124). Latvijas Universitate.
Kapitsaki, G. M., & Christou, M. (2014). Where is Scrum in the current Agile world? In 2014 9th International Conference on Assessment of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Lenberg, P., Tengberg, L. G. W., & Feldt, R. (2017). An initial analysis of software engineers’ attitudes towards organizational change. Empirical Software Engineering, 22(4), 2179- 2205.
O’Connell, T. (2014). An analysis of the implementation of agile software development practice in Irish industry. International Journal on Advances in Software Volume 7, Number 3 & 4, 2014.
Schatz, B., & Abdelshafi, I. (2005). Primavera gets agile: a successful transition to agile development. IEEE software, 22(3), 36-42.
Van Oorschot, K. E., Sengupta, K., & Van Wassenhove, L. N. (2018). Under Pressure: The Effects of Iteration Lengths on Agile Software Development Performance. Project Management Journal, 49(6), 78-102.
