Rolling Wave Planning
Rolling Wave Planning is an approach to project and program planning. I’ve heard it said that an Economist is someone who can tell you exactly why something has happened, but who can’t predict what will happen next. That’s probably because predicting the future is difficult. Given this, it’s not hard to see why our initial project plans often turn out to be wildly inaccurate.
To counter this, Rolling Wave Planning is the process of planning a project progressively in waves (or steps) as the project unfolds. Short term activities are planned at a detailed level whilst longer term activities which are further away are planned at a low level of detail. Rolling Wave Planning can be particularly useful when the approach to be taken, or even the requirements, are dependent on the outcome of some or all of the near term planning.
Rolling Wave Planning is a type of Progressive Elaboration, which is a technique whereby we acknowledge that not everything can be known at the start of the project, and based on past experience we allow the project to unfold itself. As soon as we know what was previously unknown, we will plan for it in detail (I hope I’m not starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld here).
Rolling Wave Planning is the only form of Progressive Elaboration included in PMBOK. It’s not difficult to see how Rolling Wave Planning might apply to modern project management methodologies, such as Agile, Lean, or Scrum. We would plan the next couple of iterations in as much detail as is possible, whilst longer term iterations would remain planned only at a high level.
It is important to understand that Rolling Wave Planning should not make it easy for scope creep to occur. Rolling Wave Planning means that in waves we bring more detail to the plan to achieve the original requirements. This is different to scope creep where the requirements are changing.
A question which often raises its head when discussing Rolling Wave Planning is whether it would be better to use separate projects rather than waves. In that way you have decision points at the end of each project to decide whether to proceed or not. I don’t think there is a right answer to this question. Choosing once approach over the other depends both on the organization itself as well as the project. For example, if the early waves of the project delivered no measurable business benefit then it would make more sense to use a Rolling Wave Planning approach, rather than a project approach, as the early projects would have no justification to begin.
Popularity: 2% [?]
The SCRUM Process | SCRUM Framework
This article gives a very quick executive summary of the Scrum process / framework.
It should be noted that referring to the Scrum Process above is somewhat of a misnomer. This is because Scrum is a framework, not a process. What this means is that rather than providing a detailed process, many of the decisions within the Scrum Framework are left up to the team to decide.
So without further ado, let’s get stuck in. Here is a diagrammatic summary of the Scrum framework:
Scrum Framework Explained
The diagram above can be described as follows:
- The Product Owner builds the product backlog and they prioritise it.
- The team then looks at this backlog and they pull work from it. It’s a pull system just like Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing operation. If you have managers getting involved at this stage (pushing) then it slows things down. This is why the team decides how much stuff they can take into the scrum and what they can deliver in a cycle (the sprint backlog).
- A Sprint cycle is no more than 4 weeks. Usually a Sprint will last between 2-4 weeks.
- Inside the cycle the team must have a daily meeting. This is used to synchronise everyone within the team.
- At the end of the cycle the team have to produce working software, and potentially shippable working software.
There you have it. A very basic introduction to the Scrum framework. Below you’ll find some definitions to further clarify the basic components of Scrum.
SCRUM Defined: Documents / Ceremonies / Roles
1. Documents
Product Backlog: This is a document containing high-level descriptions of all features to be developed in business priority order. This document is owned by the Product Owner. Typically, each item on the list will contain a rough estimate of both business value and development effort.
Sprint backlog: This is simply the list of things (again in priority order) that the team thinks they can do in the current Sprint. This is chosen by the team (pull) not by managers (push).
Burndown Chart: These simply show the amount of work remaining – they show in an instant wheather we are on or off target. They can work either at a Sprint level or a Release level. An example Burndown Chart is shown below:
2. Ceremonies
Sprint Planning: This happens on day 1 of the Sprint and is where the team members create the Sprint Backlog.
Daily Scrum Meeting: These are used to synchronize the work of the team. The meeting should last no more than 15 minutes. Each team member discusses what they worked on yesterday, what they’re working on today, and any blockers they’re facing.
Sprint Retrospective: (aka Sprint Review) This occurs at the end of the Sprint and gives the entire team the opportunity to examine the Sprint just completed and identify improvement opportunities for the next Sprint.
3. Roles
Product Owner: Owns the Product Backlog. Essentially the Product Owner directs the team to ensure they are working on the right requirements.
Scrum Master: This role does not direct the team like a Project Manager and allocate tasks, instead they shield the team from outside distractions and remove blockers to enable the team to work as quickly as possible.
Conclusion
I hope this article has given you a good basic understanding of the Scrum Framework, and that you understand why it’s a framework and not a process. Additionally, you will understand that the team is self-organizing, in that the team as a whole determines its own destiny, one Sprint at a time.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Excel Pareto Chart: Instructions & Template
The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80-20 rule, which is a general principle referring to the observation that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. You might sometimes hear specific instances of the Pareto Principle, for example:
- 80% of results come from 20% of the work
- 80% of the land is owned by 20% of the people
- 80% of sales are attributed to 20% of customers
- 80% of wealth belongs to 20% of the people
The Pareto Principle is named after Vilfredo Pareto who observed in Italy in the 19th Century, that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. He then developed the principle further by observing 20% of the pea pods in the garden contained 80% of the peas. More information about the history of the Pareto principle can be found on Wikipedia.
Pareto Charts
Pareto Charts are used within Six Sigma to aid in the identification of root causes. A Pareto Chart will help you find the most important factors amongst a large set of factors. Essentially, Pareto analysis can be used to help you identify the 20% of the causes resulting in 80% of the problems. A Pareto Chart is a combination of a bar chart and a line graph, with individual values represented by the bars in descending order, and the line representing the cumulative total of the bars in percentage terms. This will be more obvious when you look at the following example:
The Pareto Chart above shows the issues which might occur in an online store. As can be seen, the left-hand vertical axis shows the number of times a particular category of issue has occurred. The right-hand vertical axis shows the percentage of all issues a particular issue represents. On the horizontal axes we have the various categories of issues themselves. This sounds complicated but it’s self explanatory once you look at the chart above.
The Pareto Chart is one of the 7 Basic Tools of Quality. These are all graphical tools which can be very useful in identifying issues related to quality.
There are a couple of pointers you should keep in mind when examining Pareto Charts:
- Look for a break point in the cumulative percent curve. This point occurs where the line begins to flatten out. Issues which occur before this point are the most important. Issues which occur after this point are less important. In the example above I would say that the break point is at “Comments”, meaning that “Registration”, Browse”, and “Search” are the categories most in need of attention.
- If you can’t determine a break point, then this could mean your issues are speadevenly across the categories. In this case you’ll need to use judgement as to which categories are the most important to resolve first.
- Try not to have catch-all categories such as “General”, “Other”, or “Miscellaneous”. Doing this introduces the risk you will not be addressing the most important category of problem first, particularly if your catch-all category has a large number of items within it.
Creating an Excel Pareto Chart
Before we get into the instructions to create your Excel Pareto Chart there are a few things you need to do in advance:
- Decide how you want to categorize your issues. Note that it is considered good practice to have less than 10 categories.
- Keep a count of the number of issues in each category. Do this by examining each issue and adding it to the most appropriate category. You might find yourself changing category names at this stage once you get into the detail of examining issues.
Now that we have collected the raw data, it’s time to go through the instructions to create our Excel Pareto Chart:
STEP 1: Collect Raw Data in Table Format
The first step is to collect your data into a table similar to the one shown below.
You can create this table yourself, or simply download and modify the Excel Pareto Chart Template I’ve provided by clicking the link.
STEP 2: Create Basic Table
To begin creating your Pareto Chart in Excel, select the Category column, the Count column, and the Cumulative Percent column as shown in the diagram below.
Hold down the Ctrl key to help you in selecting the columns. Notice that you do not select any data elements from the TOTALS row. Now that you have the right columns selected it’s time to create the table by selecting the Insert tab in Excel, the Column button, and then choosing Cluster Column. This is shown below:
Your Pareto Chart will now look like this:
STEP 3: Create A Basic Pareto Chart
Now that we have our basic diagram, it’s time to make it look more like a Pareto chart. To do this right click on any one of the Culminative Percent bars in the diagram. Select Change Series Chart Type and then select Line as shown below
Once you have done this you’re diagram will look as follows:
STEP 4: Add a Second Axes
You chart should now be beginning to look like a Pareto Chart, but it will still have just one axes. Now it’s time to fix this. Do this by right-clicking on the Cumulative Total line and choosing Format Data Series. Now select the Secondary Axes as shown below:
Once you close the pop-up window, you should now see the secondary axis as shown below:
STEP 4: Make it Pretty
Your Excel Pareto Chart is just about done. In fact, you can stop after step 3 if you’re just using the Pareto Chart for yourself. However, if you’ve intending to show the chart to anyone else then by following this step you can make it easy for others to understand too.
The first thing to do is to get our percent axis to finish at 100% and not 120%. To do this, right click on the right-hand axes and select Format Axes. Now, under the Axes Options tab select Maximum to set it to be Fixed, and then manually set the value to 100 as shown in the diagram below:
This will result in your Pareto Chart looking as follows:
We are almost there. We just need to label our axes and we’re done. To do this select your chart, choose the Layout tab, and select Axes Titles as shown in the picture below:
Congratulations! Your Excel Pareto Chart is complete, and should look as follows:
Pareto Chart Conclusion
The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80 20 Rule, and it refers to the fact that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. A Pareto Chart is a graphical tool allowing you to understand which categories result in the most issues, enabling you to target the most troublesome areas first. This can be done at an organization level, a project level, or a product level, amongst others. Creating an Excel Pareto Chart requires a little bit of Excel wizardry which is why I’ve provided the step-by-step instructions above. However, as a short cut you can simply download the Excel Pareto Chart Template.
Popularity: 19% [?]
SWOT Analysis: How to
SWOT analysis is a technique which can be used to aid strategic planning. Strategic Planning can be thought of as the process an organisation uses to define it’s strategy, that is, it’s future course.
SWOT Defined
SWOT Analysis is a technique we can use to understand the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats being faced in order to achieve a particular objective. SWOT analysis can be used in a number of contexts, covering both organizations and our personal lives. SWOT works by examining internal factors (Strengths and Weaknesses) and external factors (Opportunities and Threats) impacting on the objective.
What gives SWOT analysis its power is that it enables us to very quickly find opportunities that we are actually well positioned to exploit. Additionally, by understanding your weak areas and external threats, you can take steps to manage those that might not have otherwise been obvious.
In a business context, SWOT helps you to construct a strategy which aligns opportunities and your strengths, so you can effectively differentiate yourself from your competitors, while at the same time mitigating potential threats facing this strategy. The aim obviously being to help your business be successful in the future.
SWOT analysis doesn’t just have to be used to determine the direction of the whole organisation, it could also be used at a product level, a marketing plan level, or even a project level. You can even use SWOT analysis to examine your competitors and their products. As mentioned previously, SWOT doesn’t just have to be confined to the business arena. We could use SWOT analysis on ourselves personally, for example, to examine our career, thus helping us to create a compelling career based on our capabilities and personal tastes matched to the opportunities in the marketplace, all the while keeping a keen eye on the threats facing us or weaknesses we might have.
Let’s examine what we mean by Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in turn, before moving on to work through an example, with the aim of giving you a thorough understanding of SWOT analysis.
Strengths
By strengths we mean the resources, products, and capabilities available which enable you to achieve a competitive advantage. Here are some questions you can use to help determine your strengths:
- Do you have patents in place?
- Do you have any cost advantages (access to cheaper resources)?
- Do you have special know-how amongst your staff?
- Do you make use of exclusive distribution rights?
- Do you have any logistical advantages?
- What do you do better than anyone else?
- What do your customers see as your strengths?
- What might your competitors say are your strengths?
Weaknesses
Weaknesses are obviously the opposite of strengths, or even just the absence of strengths in particular areas. Here are some questions you can use to determine your weaknesses:
- Are you missing patent protection in certain areas?
- Are your resources too expensive, or your cost structure too expensive?
- Are you lacking know-how?
- Are your distribution channels weak?
- Are your distribution rights non-exclusive or shared?
- What do your competitors do better than you?
- If customers have left you, why was this?
- If you are consistently failing to make sales, why is this?
- What might your competitors see as your weakness?
Opportunities
Examining the external environment may result in identifying new opportunities. Another way to approach this is to examine your already completed strengths and determine if any of them could evolve into opportunities. Additionally, you could examine your weaknesses to see if resolving any of them would lead to opportunities. Here are some questions you can ask to help identify opportunities:
- What are the major trends in the marketplace?
- What are the trends in government policy/law?
- How are people’s social behaviours changing?
- How are populations changing?
- How are environments changing?
- What is likely to be your competitors focus in the coming years?
- What are customers asking for?
- Have you noticed changes in what your customers are buying?
- How are peoples lifestyles, working environments changing?
Threats
Here we examine what changes in the external environment could pose a threat. Questions to ask here include:
- Could customer needs or trends shift your customers away from you or your product?
- Are there potentially new laws or regulations which could impact you?
- Is the industry or your consumer moving the same direction?
- Could new technology render your business/project/skills/product obsolete?
- Can you determine your competitor’s strategy and how much should you be worried about this?
- What barriers are in your way preventing you from getting to where you want to be, and can these be overcome?
Tips for Performing a SWOT Analysis
When performing your SWOT analysis, there are a few useful tips you should keep in mind:
- To help you gather your SWOT data you may want to consider using Brainstorming or the Delphi Technique (these are described in the article on Identifying Risks).
- Once you have a list of bullet points under each item of the SWOT, prioritise them so the most important is at the top and the least important at the bottom. This is useful in helping you to concentrate your thinking on the most important factors.
- Be as specific as you can. Instead of saying “we’re cheaper than our competitors” say “we’re 20% cheaper on average than our closest competitor”
- Don’t just rely on SWOT analysis to feed into your strategic planning. Use additional tools such as PEST analysis, EPISTEL, or STEER analysis.
The SWOT Matrix
The SWOT matrix is simply the major strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats drawn in matrix form as shown below:
One area where a SWOT analysis can be powerful, is that it can help an organization understand that it should’t necessarily chase the most lucrative idea. Instead there might be better ways to create competitive advantage within the marketplace, that is, where aproaching opportunities seem to fit with your strengths, and the opposition are moving in a different direction so that the visible threats are minimal.
SWOT Example
In order to understand SWOT analysis more deeply, let’s walk through an example. In this example we’re going to perform an analysis of an online retailer of books. We’ll first collect the data and then, based on this, propose two potential strategies. First, here is the SWOT data for our imaginary bookstore:
- Strengths:
- Largest online seller of books in core territory.
- Low overheads as no stores required. Therefore we are the cheapest in our core territory.
- Access to a much wider range of books than a physical store.
- Great online retail platform.
- Weaknesses:
- Poor customer support (email only customer support provided).
- We do not have exclusive distribution rights to any of the books we sell.
- We have a broad focus whereas our competitors are focussed on individual niches.
- City centre distribution centre has limited expansion capacity.
- Opportunities:
- The popularity of eBooks is increasing rapidly
- As the population becomes more educated we expect year on year book sales to continue to increase
- Threats:
- Technological change means growth is only for digitally distributed books whilst physical book sales decline
In terms of a SWOT matrix for our bookstore, this could be represented as follows:
By completing the SWOT analysis and by examining the SWOT matrix for our bookstore, we might derive the following two strategies (each would obviously need to be evaluated before one was decided upon):
- Focus on providing customers with a great price and great customer service: introduce telephone based customer service. Offset the cost of this by moving the distribution centre out of the city centre so it operates on a lower cost base.
- Focus on eBooks: we already have a great online retail platform. Aim to achieve time limited exclusive distribution rights (can we sell an eBook exclusively 1-week before anyone else if we can promise certain volumes?).
Can you think of any other strategies the bookstore may want to consider based on the SWOT matrix?
Conclusion
In summary, SWOT analysis facilitates the creation of a strategy by examining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It can be used in a personal or business context. It’s power comes from it’s ability to help us carve out competitive advantage. They are also relatively simple to perform. If you’re running a project or a program, why not see if there are any obvious improvements which can be made to it by working with your team to perform a SWOT analysis.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Triple Constraints | Six Constraints
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the term “triple constraint”, which refers to the three way conflict between scope, time, and cost. This constraint is often represented diagrammatically as follows:
What this diagram is attempting to show is that if you change any constraint (scope, time, or cost) you must impact the other two constraints in some way. For example, if you wanted to increase the scope of a project, this will have the effect of increasing the time taken and thus the cost of the project. On the other hand, if you wanted to reduce the time taken, but we’re not prepared to reduce the scope, then clearly it’s going to cost more to complete the project.
In the 4th edition of PMBOK, some changes have been made to this notion of the triple constraint. Firstly, the term cost has been changed to “budget”, and the term time to “schedule”. More importantly (in my opinion), three new constraints have been added: Quality, Resource, and Risk. Diagrammatically, this might look as follows:
You could argue that Quality was previously covered under Scope, and Resource under Cost, but I don’t think that Risk fits anywhere under the original constraints. Let’s look at the 6 constraints a little closer.
Changing any one of the constraints will impact the other five. Your aim is to apply the constraints to meet the unique needs of the project you’re managing. You should be working with your stakeholders to make conscious decisions about the 6 constraints.
For example, if you’re running a project that must hit a specific date, then if by going through the constraints with your stakeholders they determine that the date must be held but your budget can’t be increased, then clearly they must make compromises around some or all of scope, quality, resource, or risk. It could be that through negotiation you agree that scope will be reduced and the quality bar will be lowered. Essentially the six constraints are a tool you can use to manage your stakeholders and their expectations.
Popularity: 10% [?]
