Project Management "Methodologies" - Agile?

[OspreyO]

Agile is popular in IT because our ability to estimate and plan is **** compared to real engineers. .

...IT also has the 'advantage' that you can deliver part of a project and still have something usable. Doesn't apply to real engineers: who will accept a suspension bridge without the deck, or a car consisting of the chassis, 2 wheels and an MP3...

I think the point is that IT projects are not always logical in the way most non IT people understand "logical". Also people who understand IT projects and are good managers are not that common.

 

[Robert]

Basically any public sector IT project I can find reference to online seems it went badly.

So those methodologies touted really don't seem to work too well!

From experience it's because methodologies aren't followed at all.

It's two, failure of the customer to articulate precisely what they want/need (may use MoSCoW) and the supplier fault for not understanding and developing requirements.

Your attitude seems to stink BTW.

 

[Robert]

5 years as a PM, how much experience in how many fields do you have?

Feel free to give examples of how you'd ensure that piece of equipment was loaded when you have to entirely rely on the knowledge of the team on the ground. What power/tools/methods do you apply then?

That's actually quite dangerous...I would hazard to guess that this is quite a rare scenario to have good comms from the ground. I certainly wouldn't be comfortable sat in a corner waiting for info to flow to me.

 

[panthro]

Just one suggestion/thought - I work in civil engineering for a utilities company, supporting a team of 26 engineers (Chartered, Incorporated, Grad/post-grad and all that ilk), some of whom have over 45 years experience under their belts.

They all believe that the best PMs for this environment are those who've gotten engineering degrees, as the PM side is covered as part of the course and covered better than on dedicated PM courses... They also lament this, as it seems more engineer-degree'd people become PMs, rather than engineers!!

Just one perspective 'from the field', as it were. Might be of use?

I have an engineering degree and worked in the oil and gas industry for the last 13 years. My experience has taught me that engineers tend to look down their nose at people who aren't engineers, which used to make me laugh when thought the supply chain guy didn't know what they were talking about. I'ts one of the reasons I've now left and am due to start work in the private healthcare industry, working on strategic procurement of capital equipment i.e. MRI, CAT, X Ray etc.

I hope the OP actually got something useful out of this thread, because I can't see that there is anything particularly relevant in the last few posts.

I would suggest that you both take a break from this thread.

Thanks - Armageus

I did thanks, I'm now investigating Agile and APM qualifications as my new role will transition from strategic to operational at some point.

 

[Nutty_Death]

It depends in which environment you want to apply your training.

I'm a Scrum Master for a software development company and have experience working in Scrum, Kanban and Lean frameworks.

The software development industry has been going towards Agile ways of working for the past 10 years and more with even larger institutions realising it's benefits over more traditional big upfront planning and delivery. Frameworks such as DSDM aren't Agile in my opinion and are just created by Project Managers as a way for them to hang on to old ways of work, there's barely anything Agile about it as it still involves big upfront planning, wasting time making un-validated hypothesis.

There's a lot miss information out there, especially from people who don't understand the Agile mindset and misrepresent its principles or apply frameworks incorrectly and say things like there's no planning, budget or end date... They don''t know what they're talking about.

Anyway as I said at the start, it depends where you want to apply this training. If it's software development then i'd suggest looking into a framework that tends to get used in Agile environments, such as Scrum.