Moving from Wiliam to Fairfax Digital has given me the opportunity to work closely within a Project Management environment as opposed to a role that was vague and pended definition.  

Working now as a Technical Project Co-ordinator in the real estate sector, means new systems to learn, new processes to adapt to and new faces to earn trusts of.  Moving from the standard PMBOK and PRINCE methods that I, in some form, used at Wiliam are completely different to a SCRUM methodology used at Fairfax Digital. 

One of the things I’ve learnt really quickly about SCRUM is that it works perfectly well in projects that change very often, or have high priority requirements. The management of projects are broken out into periods of time (usually a month) otherwise known as Sprints. Each sprint dictates what the capacity of the team members are, the expected output of work required and the monitoring of the progress of tasks during that sprint.

A graph is laid out to indicate ideal output .vs. actual output per staff. This then equates to overall project success. At the beginning of the project, the project manager lays out all the tasks into a ‘Product Backlog’. Out of that backlog, tasks are pulled out to form a ‘Sprint Backlog’ which determine what tasks are expected to be done during that sprint.  

A daily meeting is scheduled to get an update from the team members on the progress of their assigned tasks. 3 questions are be answered in each meeting – ‘what was done yesterday?’, ‘what will be done today?’ and ‘are there any issues?’  This meeting is in now way a means of status, but a means of commitment ensuring that what each member said is heard by their peers and the next day is heard again confirming “yesterday’s” tasks.  

The methodology allows pushing in a balance of high and low priority tasks where revenue is achieved in the quickest possible time. Iterations of deliverables are produced at the end of each sprint resulting in the final product launch at last sprint cycle.

Though given that a project in this nature can very well change scope, the SCRUM method allows for additional tasks and changes to the project to be added to the Product Backlog until such time that it is approved to be prioritised into the sprint backlog. 

This method has proved successful at various companies some to mention are Microsoft, Yahoo, Lexis Nexis, Lockheed Martin, Sun Microsystems and of course Fairfax Digital. 

In due course I will discuss about various phases such as planning, monitoring, project managing and delivery stories through this approach.