Business Finance Homework Help

Person 1; Post:

TopicDriving Change Through Agility

by Bhandari – Saturday, 17 July 2021, 6:17 PM

Changes are inevitable in any big project and when the project is agile, these changes are so frequent it becomes hard to keep track of them. Failure to keep track of those changes can create conflicts later among clients and stakeholders. These can also increase the chances of scope creeping in the project. So it is absolutely necessary to manage changes, though the details of changes do not require to be maintained as thoroughly as in traditional change management. With an agile project management development lifecycle, the change management process also needs to be more agile. It is common to have a change management process in place to manage changes and there are frameworks particularly created to fit agile process for managing changes. The importance of managing changes can be summarized as a discipline that guides how we prepare, equip and support individuals to successfully adopt a change to drive organizational success and outcomes (What is Change Management, n.d.). Because of the nature of the agile project, change management should be considered as agile’s integral part. As a matter of fact, the agile process facilitates the change management process in multiple ways like early customer input throughout the lifecycle and development process along with early feedbacks helps identify and implement changes early. Also, backlog groomings help identify potential changes as well as sometimes, and daily meetings and frequent communication patterns of agile projects help identify as well as manage changes efficiently. Not only these but also the user stories and sprints in agile facilitates changes. For example, in a software development process, a story is created by the product owner. The team builds the feature out of it and at the end of the sprint, the team receives feedback with possible changes like a missing feature. Now, these changes are managed in the next sprint by creating a new story by the product owner which is implemented by the team in the next sprint.

The traditional way of managing changes is very rigorous and requires lots of effort and resources. AS a result, the fourth value of the Agile Manifesto “Responding to change over following a plan” is often mistranslated as agile opposing change management. Instead, this value is about focusing and prioritizing to respond to any changes. Agile being a change-oriented process, the need for change management is arguably increased in Agile because of its iterative nature, the amount of churn created, and consequently, its impact on climate and readiness (Alsher, 2018). By adopting proper change management, a business can focus on delivering values and applying changes inappropriate time, cost and quality. Agile is incremental in nature, the changes are frequent but are easy to manage as changes can be integrated immediately in small chunks, unlike traditional processes. However, the frequency of the changes can be overwhelming in agile, so the changes should be managed and the organization should have a predefined set of processes to manage changes in place. However, the management process in agile can be different than the traditional way of managing changes like in agile, there may not be the necessity of templates for managing changes, and formalization and standardization are not required to manage changes in agile. However, the agile project requires adept change practitioners. One of the additional benefits of managing changes in an agile project is that the changes are frequent, but are usually small and are introduced early because of the nature of agile projects. As a result, the disruptions happen early and resistance occurs earlier which can be planned, managed, and mitigate earlier unlike traditional processes. Also, change management in the agile project helps increase productivity, reduces conflicts, decreases risks, and helps improve the return of investment for the organization.

References:

Alsher, P. (2018, March 29). 5 Implications for Change Management in an Agile World. https://www.imaworldwide.com/blog/5-implications-for-change-management-in-an-agile-world.

What is Change Management? Prosci. (n.d.). https://www.prosci.com/resources/articles/what-is-change-management.

Person 2 post: Justus

Topic: CIOs (Management) and Agility Today

by – Saturday, 17 July 2021, 5:59 PM

Summary

Schwartz compares the old way vs. the new way of doing things. He says IT leaders should be regarded business leaders; they shouldn’t be isolated to “IT.” Schwartz states that that the traditional “old” approach is the wrong way of going about it in a world that is changing rapidly.

Schwartz also talks about the history of doing business the traditional way vs the new way that has resulted in the situation that many organizations still find themselves in and the behaviors that continue to reinforce that IT is a separate entity from the business. This is a situation leads to business and IT having a contractor-based agreement, with business controlling IT, and IT building what the business wants and handing it over.

Some of the key take ways are as follows:

· The traditional view that views IT as an external entity hinders the organization from realizing the benefits of the Agile and Lean approach.

· The relationship between the business and IT leaders needs to be redefined. IT leaders need to be considered as part of the whole organization and they deserve a seat at the table.

· IT leader’s responsibilities should shift to include producing and supporting business outcomes, instead of just delivering IT capabilities that business need.

What is your perspective of the CIO in an Agile world?

The CIO in the agile world, should be the driving force of the technology, innovation, and quality of the digital transformation. The CIO should realize and the following misconceptions:

· IT doesn’t provide customer service; they are more than that

· All IT does it taking requirements from business and then delivering them

· Don’t run IT as a “business”

· They “business” wants to control IT, this isn’t ideal. IT should partner with business for this relationship to work

How does the role of the CIO impact Agile project management? discuss some positive & negative aspects?

Some of the negative aspects, include the changing of requirements and rapid change in the industry. But its is a huge relief to see that the benefits outweigh the negatives.

According to Schwartz (2017), for an IT leader the advantages of the agile approach are as follows:

• Learning: In the Agile approach, we learn as we go and incorporate what we learn. In a plan-driven approach, we can only learn to the extent that it does not change our original plan. Which is better: To adjust as we learn, or to reject learning for the sake of the plan?
• Nimbleness: In the Agile approach, we harness change to the company’s advantage. As a project proceeds, circumstances change. Competitors introduce new products. The government introduces new regulations. New technologies appear. Our choice is between changing the plan to accommodate new developments or ignoring new developments.
• Course Correction: In the Agile approach, we adjust course based on feedback—from users, from a product owner, from objective measures of system performance, and from management. The alternatives are to get less feedback or to ignore feedback.
• Delivery: In the Agile approach, we deliver quickly and frequently to users. In the plan-driven approach, delivery often comes at the end of the project. Early delivery lets the business get value earlier (and there is a time value of money) and checks to see whether the product works in an operational setting.
• Risk: In the Agile approach, we reduce risk by testing and delivering in short increments. At any given time, we risk only the small increment being worked on. In the plan-driven approach, on the other hand, risk increases until delivery—the more we do without finishing and delivering, the more is at risk from defects, operational problems, or our inability to finish.
• Salvage Value: In the Agile approach, we can terminate a project at any time without wasting money, since all the work to date has been delivered and is in use. In a plan-driven approach with delivery at the end, terminating the project before completion generally means that nothing has been salvaged.
• Budget Adherence: In the Agile approach, we can ensure that we work within budget. We simply adjust scope as necessary to fit within the given resources. With the plan-driven approach, we must keep working until we complete the plan—the defined scope—even if that means we run behind schedule or over budget. Or we can terminate the project without delivering anything.
• Technical Practices: The Agile toolset is powerful, and technical excellence is highly valued. Agile techniques include zero-downtime deployments; A/B testing; and clustered, containerized microservices for high availability. Tools such as burndown charts give us the most accurate way to gauge the status of an initiative; task boards bring teams together with a common picture of the work in progress; cumulative flow diagrams help us pinpoint process flaws; and value stream maps help us diagnose the underlying sources of waste.

References

Schwartz, M. (2017). A Seat at the Table. IT Revolution