Interviews
- »One on One with Ed Hess
Grow or Die. It’s probably the most common business axiom, and the least accurate, according to the new book “Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth” (Columbia Business School Publishing). To better understand the book’s implications for firms, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with the book’s author, Ed Hess, a former Arthur Andersen strategy consultant and current professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business.
- »One on One with Summit's David Litherland
When prospective employees interview for a job, they obsess over making a good, lasting impression. Firms should do the same. To learn how firms can avoid typical pitfalls, Consulting’s One on One sat down with David Litherland, managing partner of Summit Search Group, an executive search firm specializing in placing professionals within professional service firms.
- »One on One with PwC's Tom Craren
Senior executives are becoming immune to traditional marketing. Marketing consultants tell us that to pierce through the white noise of corporate communication, firms should consider “content marketing”. Instead of more traditional marketing, providing valuable insight and perspective in a blog or electronic newsletter can serve as a more effective door opener. One of the best examples is PricewaterhouseCoopers’ “10-Minute” series. For almost three years, PwC has boiled down complex thought leadership into small electronic pieces an executive can read in about ten minutes. To learn more about PwC’s marketing efforts, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with Tom Craren, the firm’s brand strategy and thought leadership leader. His team of 20 writers produces between two to three 10-minute pieces each month, along with more detailed white papers.
- »One on One with Stanford Hospital's Kate Surman
Transitioning healthcare companies from paper to electronic records presents huge consulting opportunities.
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»Book It!
Consulting magazine's Book It! section highlights new books either written by or for those in management consulting. Each issue, editor's choose four recently released books to review.
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2009
»Excerpt: Agile Project Management
The following is an excerpt from Karen R.J. White’s Agile Project Management: A Mandate for the 21st Century (Center for Business Practices, 2009).
 Chapter 5: Our Agile Future
Traditional management methods, including project management, came of age over the course of the 20th century, evolving hand in hand with certain bureaucratic assumptions—assumptions about power, control, centralization, and linear problem solving—most of which do not work very well anymore. To predict how agile methods may be used in organizations in the next few decades from our vantage point in 2008 is perilous: it’s unlikely that we can actually foresee how business will alter. (Imagine yourself back in 1980 for a moment: could you have predicted Facebook as a business tool?) Yet certain trends are clear:
Agile methods will somewhat clash with currently existing standards in project management, as well as standards in many application areas of project management.
Implementing agile processes in a multicultural, distributed environment will test the cultural sensitivity of the best project managers.
The project manager role will morph as it takes on features of adaptive management.
Environmental and political stresses will create a groundswell of demand for processes like agile that can help us respond to global problems nimbly.
Once out of the software development box, agile methods will be found to resonate in many, if not all, areas of the business—most importantly, in helping corporate leaders to do strategic planning under conditions of uncertainty.
Implications of Standards and Compliance
The very notion of industry and professional standards—particularly where compliance with those standards is backed up by formal regulation, as with the project manager qualification in Australia, or in the practice of medicine worldwide—presents a formidable hurdle to the adoption of agile methods in management. Wherever governments or professional organizations have striven to guarantee consumer and worker safety and/or best-practice governance of organizations, those regulations and standards act to eliminate exactly the sort of creative, flexible behaviors that agile methods seek to capitalize upon. Is it, in fact, even possible to use agile methods within best-practice frameworks of this type? At the present stage of development, this question remains unanswered, yet there are some indications that, where there is a necessity for agile project management, there is a way to adapt the practices and still remain in sync with accepted standards.
For example, at a recent meeting of the National Nuclear Security Agency, presenters reporting on the results of a massive construction project—precisely the sort of high-security, low-risk-tolerance project that has previously been a beneficiary of linear project management practices—noted in their lessons learned that “when you include equipment that isn’t well understood in the scope, it creates problems,” and that a more agile approach to planning would have alleviated the 17-month schedule overrun the plant experienced. Their observation is certainly applicable to any industry or government project that uses cutting-edge technology. When following accepted practice becomes a financial burden, can the adaptation of more realistic agile methods be far behind?
Likewise in the pharmaceuticals industry, the processes and standards for drug development and manufacture are heavy with bureaucratic redundancies designed to ensure patient safety—yet there is pressure on the industry to bring life-saving medications to market more quickly. A child dying of AIDS doesn’t have the five to seven years that it can take to bring a new drug over the hurdles. As the global village grows smaller, the ability to treat new diseases—or diseases spreading from the tropics as a result of climate change and global travel—will at some point make agility more desirable both from a bottom-line standpoint and from the doctors’ and patients’ standpoint.
One area that some agile gurus are already addressing is the way that agility can actually support, rather than conflict with, such drivers of corporate transparency and risk management as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. [Agile expert] Ross Pettit points out that factors outside the control of a company’s internal operations often impair execution of even the best-laid plans. The ability to forecast and respond to change in a timely fashion will go a long way to meeting revenue targets and goals, reducing risk. Instead of forecasts based on “the pursuit of a mythical number given at the beginning of a quarter,” agile practices such as decomposing deliverables into smaller components, each with an associated revenue amount, gives the company a granular unit of work with economic properties.
Further, companies could define the fiscal quarter as an agile “release” divided into 13 iterations of one week each, giving time-boxes around which to construct a plan, and the flexibility to respond to customer and business environment changes.
Globalization, Relationships, and Making it Work
With today’s business climate being driven more and more by a global economy and becoming more challenged by the broad implications of energy cost, the demand to achieve more from less is increasing exponentially. Investors demand higher returns on investment, shorter time to market with fewer resources, and improved quality within collapsing timelines. The result in developed nations is more and more headlines about companies reducing human resources and reorganizing in attempts to locate less costly means to get their product to market. The impact has been to look offshore to emerging nations that still have low wages, but the skills to meet increasing productivity demands. The consequences have been mixed, at best. It is becoming more apparent that the solution to simply move work offshore to realize lower costs is not the panacea many thought and proclaimed. To leverage the lower cost and resource scalability for an offshore solution, the strategy must include the cultural implications, the quality of the communications and physical infrastructures, the availability of qualified human resources, and the development of structures that will facilitate getting product to market faster.
Offshore product development deals embody a broad range of engagement types, from hiring a small job shop for a focused project, to expansive deals worth hundreds of millions with corporations that have global subsidiaries. Not infrequently these deals are designed in such a manner to preclude the possibility of an agile development process, even if one of the sides would like to use it. As indicated elsewhere, the agile process requires collaboration and open communication, assumes flexibility that accommodates change, and has an iterative architecture with evolving deliverables and frequent replanning. These requirements virtually fly in the face of critical pricing models which rely heavily on predictable results. It nearly goes without saying that predictive processes are needed to produce predictable results. Agile, being an adaptive process, lies at the opposite end of the development methodology spectrum.
 Corporations tend to want firm-fixed price contracts to remove developmental risk from them and help to budget and control cost. This is especially true where the company considers itself to be vulnerable, as is frequently perceived for offshore agreements. Outsourcing engagements that fit agile development must have pricing models such as time and material that provide the required flexibility for both the client and vendor. Agile practices require open environments, shared goals, common vision of the business product, collaboration, strong team integration, and constant communication. Barriers between customers, developers and other stakeholders have to be removed to provide maximum transparency for the teams to be integrated. This requires that the client and provider share risk in the pricing agreements.
Consequently, a frequently heard question is, “Will agile practices work on projects with physically distributed resources?” Given the project change dynamics, cost and speed to market forces, the obvious, if simplistic, answer is: “They must!” With that, however, when carefully assessed, one must again recognize that the contributors to offshore effectiveness remain basically the same as they are locally: communication, collaboration, feedback loops and visibility.
Strategic Planning Under Uncertainty
As long ago as 1988, management thinkers noticed that accepted practices for formulating corporate strategy were becoming inadequate for the modern business environment. A collection of articles from the Harvard Business Review shows experts from McKinsey & Company, Royal Dutch/Shell, and from Wharton, Yale, Columbia and Harvard business schools struggling to describe and name processes that work for doing strategic planning under conditions of uncertainty. At the root of the traditional approach to strategic planning, the McKinsey authors noted, lies an assumption that applying a set of analytic tools allows executives to predict the future of a business. However, this system only works in a relatively stable environment. What’s needed, they say, is a way to reserve “the right to play” while avoiding high-risk postures, and keeping your options open as the situation unfolds. The word “agile” does not appear in this article—or anywhere in the book—and yet it is written between every line. When another author discusses “Discovery-Driven Planning” we know the techniques he is searching for are comprised within the agile portfolio.
The emerging world of business, characterized by uncertainty, resource shortages, the global village, and dynamic markets, cries out for planning and management processes that can help businesses and people tame the sense of chaos. Within chaos is always the promise of creative change and a new order. By becoming adept in agile methodologies and in managing our projects with agility, we can learn to ride the wave instead of being swamped by it.
Karen R.J. White is a senior director for consulting services for PM Solutions. Agile Project Management is available at pmsolutions.com/insights/publications/.
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