Becoming Nimble the Agile Project Management Way

In dictionary terms, ?agile? means ?able to move quickly and easily?. In project management terms, the definition is ?project management characterized by division of tasks into short work phases called ?sprints?, with frequent reassessments and adaptation of plans?. This technique is popular in software development but is also useful when rolling out other projects.

Managing the Seven Agile Development Phases

  • Stage 1: Vision. Define the software product in terms of how it will support the company vision and strategy, and what value it will provide the user. Customer satisfaction is of paramount value including accommodating user requirement changes.
  • Stage 2: Product Roadmap. Appoint a product owner responsible for liaising with the customer, business stakeholders and the development team. Task the owner with writing a high-level product description, creating a loose time frame and estimating effort for each phase.
  • Stage 3: Release Plan. Agile always looks ahead towards the benefits that will flow. Once agreed, the Product Road-map becomes the target deadline for delivery. With Vision, Road Map and Release Plan in place the next stage is to divide the project into manageable chunks, which may be parallel or serial.
  • Stage 4: Sprint Plans. Manage each of these phases as individual ?sprints?, with emphasis on speed and meeting targets. Before the development team starts working, make sure it agrees a common goal, identifies requirements and lists the tasks it will perform.
  • Stage 5: Daily Meetings. Meet with the development team each morning for a 15-minute review. Discuss what happened yesterday, identify and celebrate progress, and find a way to resolve or work around roadblocks. The goal is to get to alpha phase quickly. Nice-to-haves can be part of subsequent upgrades.
  • Stage 6: Sprint Review. When the phase of the project is complete, facilitate a sprint review with the team to confirm this. Invite the customer, business stakeholders and development team to a presentation where you demonstrate the project/ project phase that is implemented.
  • Stage 7: Sprint Retrospective. Call the team together again (the next day if possible) for a project review to discuss lessons learned. Focus on achievements and how to do even better next time. Document and implement process changes.

The Seven Agile Development Phases ? Conclusions and Thoughts

The Agile method is an excellent way of motivating project teams, achieving goals and building result-based communities. It is however, not a static system. The product owner must conduct regular, separate reviews with the customer too.

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Choosing Routes for ESOS Compliance

Along the introduction of Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme in UK is the quick emergence of various companies that offer ESOS compliant services. While some energy audit providers can help, qualified businesses should understand what their compliance options are, how these routes work and learn both the pros and cons in order to carefully take their pick.

Independent ISO 50001 Certification

ISO 50001 comprises the integration and application of processes geared to motivate energy saving and overall improvement. Simply stated, it is a framework that drives the organisation’s governance to realise energy saving strategies by allocating resources and participating in energy management. The good thing about ISO 50001 is that it includes an energy review that documents ideas and opportunities to save more energy.

However, ISO 50001 does not obligate organisations to cover 90% of their overall energy consumption. In case of partial coverage, the company needs to undergo additional energy assessments to evaluate all the significant energy consumption areas.

In order for an ISO 50001 certification to be valid, it must be certified by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS), by an accreditation body which is a member of the International Accreditation Forum, or by a body accredited by another EU member state?s national accreditation body.

Display Energy Certificates and Green Deal Assessments

These two kinds of energy assessment reports can also contribute to ESOS compliance. Both of them are carried out by qualified lead assessors and valid for 10 years. However, they are only based on the building structures and services. They do not cover the overall significant areas in energy consumption. Since these reports are valid for 10 years, they would be used for two ESOS reporting periods. Thus, they would not be as current as the ISO 50001 certification. Aside from that, the assessments are purely based on energy efficiency and anyone can qualify to use the software that produce the certifications after taking the accreditation course.

Energy Audits

A successful energy audit leads to better understanding of the company?s energy consumption, identify alternatives, determine cost-effective energy saving opportunities and stimulate energy efficiency. Energy audits are beneficial to the organisation. What makes it complex is that the organisation applying it, needs to clearly define the scope and type of energy audit to use in order to comply with ESOS. Furthermore, the organisation also has to identify the teams that would be competent enough to do the audit work for the building, transport and industrial area, respectively.

Each route is not formed equal. Thus, organisations have the option to either choose one or combine the routes and meet their company needs. The options mentioned are different approaches to ESOS and the core value is to grab the opportunity towards acquiring more savings through efficient energy system.

How Ecovaro Can Help

Ecovaro is passionate about making a difference. We are knowledgeable when it comes to ESOS legislation and regulation, ISO 50001 energy management system, DECs and Green Deal Assessments. More than that, we recognise the great impact of efficient management system to your organisation. And with this, we provide an enthusiastic team of software engineers and expert project managers to offer you our professional help at reasonable price. Ecovaro comes to you fully equipped with services tailored to your organisation’s energy management needs.

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Succeed at Transformation

Despite the pomp and fanfare associated with launching corporate transformation programs, in reality very few of them succeed. According to a recent report by McKinsey the success rate is pegged below 40%. In addition, the same research indicates that defensive transformations – those undertaken as part of crisis management – have lower chances of success than progressive ones – those launched to streamline operations and foster growth. However, adopting certain strategies, like setting clear and high goals, and maintaining energy and engagement throughout the implementation phase, can really boost the project’s success rate. A key aspect of business transformation is IT transformation. This can be attributed to the fact that significant business change is either driven or influenced by technological change.

So what is IT Transformation?

IT transformation is basically a holistic reorganisation of the existing technological infrastructure that supports the company’s mission critical functions. In essence, IT transformation is not all about effecting change for the sake of change but involves systematic steps that align IT systems to business functions. To appreciate this approach, it is important to explore current trends in the business world where human resource, finance and IT transformations are being carried out in unison. This is being done to develop strong corporate centres that are leaner, agile and more productive that enhance greater synergies across all business functions.

IT transformation inevitably results in major changes of the information system’s technology, involving both hardware and software components of the system, the architecture of the system, the manner in which data is structured or accessed, IT control and command governance, and the components supporting the system. From this scope of works it is evident that IT transformation is a huge project that requires proper planning and implementation in order to succeed.

Tips to Improve Success in IT transformations Projects

1. Focus on Benefits not Functionality

The project plan should be more focused on benefits that can be accrued if the system is implemented successfully rather than system functionality. The benefits should be in line with business goals, for instance cost reduction and value addition. The emphasis should be on the envisaged benefits which are defined and outlined during the project authorisation. The business benefits outlined should be clear, feasible, compelling and quantifiable. Measures should be put in place to ensure that the benefits are clearly linked to the new system functionality.

2. Adopt a Multiple Release Approach

Typically most IT projects are planned with focus on a big launch date set in years to come. This approach is highly favoured because it simplifies stakeholder expectation management and avoids the complexity associated with multiple incremental releases. However, this approach misses the benefit of getting early critical feedback on functioning of the system. In addition, the long lead times often result in changes in project scope and loss of critical team members and stakeholders. IT transformation projects should be planned to deliver discrete portions of functionality in several releases. The benefit of multiple release approach is that it reduces project risks and most importantly allows earlier lessons learnt to be incorporated in future releases.

3. Capacity of the Organisation to confront Change

As pointed out, IT transformations result in significant changes in business operations and functions. Hence it is important that all business stakeholders should be reading from the same script in regards to changes expected. In addition, key stakeholders should be involved in crucial project stages and their feedback incorporated to ensure that the system is not only functional but business focused.

How Armstrong World Industries is going Cradle-to-Cradle

The Cradle-to-Cradle concept holds that human effort must be biometric, in other words enrich the environment within which it functions as opposed to breaking it down. This means manufacturing must be holistic in the sense that everything is reusable and nothing is destroyed. Armstrong World Industries was the first global mineral ceiling tile manufacturer to achieve Cradle-to-Cradle certification. We decided to take a closer look at how they achieved this.

Armstrong Worldwide Industries has five plants in the UK alone. These produce an annual turnover of ?2.7 billion. They have been making ceilings for more than 150 years. Fifteen years ago and way ahead of the curve it started recycling, and has maintained a policy of not charging contractors for waste ever since. Along the way, it developed a product that can be re-used indefinitely.

The Challenge

Going green must also be commercially sustainable. In Armstrong?s case, it faced a rise in landfill tax from ?8 per tonne per year to ?80 per tonne per year. This turned the financial cost of waste from a nuisance to a threat. It calculated that recycling one tonne of ceiling materials would:

  • Eliminate 456kg of CO2 equivalents by saving 1,390 kWh of electricity
  • Preserve 11 tons of virgin material and save 1,892 gallons of potable water

They hoped to extend their own recycling project by asking demolition and strip-out contractors to join it, so they could reprocess their scrap as new batches of tiles too.

The Achievement

As things stand today, an Armstrong ceiling tile now contains an average of 82% recycled content. Indeed, if they could find more ceilings to recycle this could reach 100%. In the past two years alone, Armstrong Worldwide Industries UK has saved 130,399m? of greenfield from landfill, being the equivalent of 520 skips that would otherwise have cost contractors over ?88,000 to dispose of.

The Broader Context

Armstrong Worldwide Industries is a global leader in water management, and is bent on minimising its reliance on fossil for energy. It has implemented online measurement systems that feed data to its corporate environmental, health and safety system. This empowers it to produce reports, track corrective actions and measure progress towards its overall goal of being carbon neutral.

Next time you sit beneath an Armstrong Worldwide Industries panelled ceiling, spare a thought for how much ecoVaro consumption analytics could contribute to your bottom line (and how it would feel to be lighter on carbon too).

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