Michigan Agile Philosophy (MAP) Project Key

Intro

Over the next 18 weeks we would like to take you on a journey.  A guided trip where we can share what we think is important as we monitor and track projects at the team and management levels. Hopefully this 18 week journey will be challenging, interesting, and occasionally whimsical.

At the last leadership retreat, Management came up with 18 “project keys” that give us guidance about what they want to make transparent and what information project teams should have at the ready.  Each week we will discuss one of the “project keys.”  Some of them may seem obvious at first, but we will explore them, peel back the layers of the project key onion and truly get to know them.

Here are some things we know about projects (as defined by MSIS).  A project:

• is temporary
• has a beginning
• has an end
• has a clearly articulated goal
• is composed of a sequence of tasks/stories/chunks of work
• has a defined outcome
• has defined deliverables
• is constrained by at least one of the following:  time, quality, budget, or scope
• has allocated resources of
• time
• people
• money
• equipment
• facilities
• is completed by a team (A team is at least 3 people working together consistently.  One member takes on the role of PM)
• has overhead and it must be considered if the work should be done with this overhead or if it should be done another way (a ticket).
• is validated by an approved MSIS decision filter
• is aligned with the MSIS strategy
• has value to some audience
• stakeholders
• users
• requires an inception deck or other approved project charter document such as an A3.
• may have risks
• should be approved at Director level
• should have a product owner
• adheres to the service delivery model of MSIS:  (link to definition of service delivery model)
• maximum length of a project is 6 months

If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them after this post.  Share with friends and colleagues if you think this information would be helpful to them.  We know that projects aren’t 100% of the work we do.  We are choosing to focus on projects as the first phase of our strategy to provide transparency into the work that we do in MSIS.

Never fear, in true agile fashion, we will adapt as we see the need.

If you’re anxious to dig in, you can take a peek at all the project keys in the graphic below.  Next week we jump in.