Equating the Project and the Business

To start, we need to view projects as the business, or at least a core part of the business. This means figuring out how to integrate project and business decision making. When you are running a business in a fast-paced, competitive environment filled with unknowns, isolating your project teams inside boxes is like driving blind. More than just opening a window to look outside the project, we need to fully integrate the project with the business strategy, other related projects, and key operational activities. In a small company, this may involve reorganizing the whole business around a single core project. In a larger company, it may require deeper integration among the project, program, and business objectives.

Achieving this business and project integration involves both internal and external aspects (see Figure 3-2). Internal elements are those that reside within the sponsor organization, such as the high-level business objectives, other projects in the company's portfolio, and day-to-day operational activities that keep the business running. Ensuring that all of these efforts are, in fact, supportive of each other requires that they are initially aligned and then that the alignment is maintained as decisions are made and the various elements change during project execution.

Figure 3-2: In agile PM, both the internal and external aspects of business and project decision making are integrated.

The external elements include your customers, competition, and any other influences external to your organization that may affect the project or the business. Information from external sources may enter the organization through your project team, a different project team, an operational area, or management or marketing and, quite often, stays in that small area of the organization. Getting this pertinent information to propagate throughout the organization is necessary for agility.

The first step in this direction is to enable, allow, and encourage project managers to look outside of their projects. Having an outward perspective is a powerful agile paradigm, yet very difficult to realize. Establishing an effective outward orientation is difficult because it involves developing a new project management infrastructure (to enable the outward view) and transforming your business environment (to allow and encourage the outward view). Both of these points will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 5 and 10, on the project manager's role and the operational infrastructure, respectively.

Agile Strategy

Have your project managers take more of an outward-facing perspective from their project, to facilitate the integration of the project and the business.

The primary reason that we need project managers to shift from an inward to an outward orientation is to get them more closely aligned with the real business objectives that the project is intended to achieve. This puts them in a position to feel the threat of competition and to understand the potential consequences of failure. An agile project needs to be more concerned with delivering results that solve business needs, rather than staying within preset project boundaries (see Figure 3-3). Project managers should be focused on beating the competition to market, developing new and unique product features, or making the best utilization of a rare resource. These goals put projects into the business context in a real way. The team is connected to the business outcome and therefore is better able to deliver results that contribute to the bottom line.

Figure 3-3: The primary focus of the project manager in an agile versus classic project environment.

Agile Strategy

Focus your project manager's energy on delivering results that solve business needs rather than staying within preset project boundaries.

One reason that the classic PM model of setting project constraints up-front works well in many situations is that the business objectives are matched to the project constraints at the start of the project. If the business environment is relatively stable, then the project constraints will remain aligned with the higher-level business objectives. However, in fast and uncertain environments where things tend to change, you may soon find that the original constraints no longer align with what's happening in the real world outside of the project. Then the reality is diverging from the box, and we need to decide whether the project is the box or if the project is the business.

In an uncertain environment, the original project boundaries will quickly diverge from the business reality.

As project boundaries (scope, schedule, resources) become more dynamic, the agile PM concept of integrating the project and the business becomes more applicable (see Figure 3-4). It should be pretty clear that decision making and thus project progress will be slowed if the management team needs to be constantly involved in redefining project boundaries.

Figure 3-4: The predominately static project boundaries of the classic project give way to more dynamic conditions in the agile project.

There is no question that effective boundary management should be a cornerstone of all types of project management, classic or agile. A clear understanding of project boundaries is critical as projects are initiated and planned to ensure that the team knows what it is trying to accomplish (scope), by when (schedule), and with what means of support (resources). At closure, too, the team and sponsor need to know whether the project was successful. How the project team and the business organization approach boundary management during the project execution may differ, however.

In classic PM, the project manager is expected to execute course changes within the schedule, scope, and resources of the project, but not necessarily changes prompted by external events. This makes sense since the project manager has intimate knowledge of what's happening inside the project but not in the overall business environment. Other people in the company are charged with understanding the various parts of the business environment and communicating relevant events back to the project manager, if deemed necessary.

Agile PM strives to get these two camps integrated so that better decisions can be made in a more timely fashion (see Figure 3-5). The project team is then better able to adapt to the constantly changing requirements inherent in the agile environment. Looking at the project as the business is one way to enable that integration of project and business decision making. Having your project managers take an outward-facing perspective is another.

Figure 3-5: Agile PM looks to integrate the internal and external project environments.