By: Ivsen Platcheck, MSC. ENG.
Introduction
After introducing what I advocate for the Project Engineering discipline, I will start describing the steps for achieving the objectives as I defined in my previous text [Pi01], using what I called “Textual User Stories”, the first attempt to describe the objective, idea, or initiative to be pursued with the project.
In all my texts, I introduce myself, in order to keep any reader aware of who I am. Even though my texts might have a sequence, they carry a closed subject, and, if someone gets any one of them, in any order, he or she can get a little more acquainted with who I am.
I’ve been working on projects for more than 40 years, now. I had done this as a team member and manager, using most of the methodologies, frameworks, or workflows that have been used by the industry during those years.
Over the last ten or twelve years, when I started to slowly dive into the agile management philosophy, I started to adopt some of its principles, tools, concepts, pillars, and artifacts. Some of them, in order to fit my needs, took the concept, and customized it to what I was seeking for the tool to behave and give me results. Even under the risk of being not too adherent to pure agile definitions, I managed to adapt to what my experience said about the initiatives I had ahead and their own peculiarities.
In the process of self-improvement, I started to model my own project-managing framework and workflows. As I am an Electrical Engineer, and I am using principles of Engineering to model my work, I decided to call this my personal approach to project Engineering, at least, to fulfill my needs and, in order to improve, and evolve, under my learning process, through the results achieved on each step, in each project. When I began to model, I felt that this could be useful to other professionals and, with their feedback I can improve and refine this approach.
Joining Agility principles, artifacts, and pillars
Due to the main features of Agile thinking, I prioritize using Agile Manifesto [ABC01] e [AMO01] principles, tools, concepts, and pillars, but I am not addicted to them.
When I need different tools, approaches, or anything that can help me achieve the goals for the project team I am managing, or, as I like to put it, the team I am leading, I bring and debate with the stakeholders. If viable, I adopt them to use in the process.
When I manage a project process, I use to make it adherent to the agile principles, more leading than actually demanding the team. I truly believe that the team responsible for the development will have the best insights, after learning along the cycles. If it becomes imperative, I let myself be a little more manager, than a proper leader. Fortunately, in the last processes, I had no events that led me to be a little more manager, in a traditional way, than a servant kind of leader.
The project process step I am defining in this text is independent of the methodology, framework, or techniques to be used. This step will give, at least, the first insights for what are the project objectives. Even though, when I lead project process teams, I use to adhere to some or all SCRUM framework definition [SS01] tools, artifacts, pillars, and workflows, according to the nature of the project to be developed.
From the Beginning – Textual User Stories
The first movements should be in order to collect, from the organization’s managers, stakeholders, marketing people, and clients, the ideas, insights, desires, problems to be solved, procedures needed for some tasks, etc.
I use to interview all of them to hear the first ideas. Then, I ask that each one of the stakeholders write a slight text about what are their wishes for this initiative. A plain text with what, in the first thoughts, they wish as the value to be produced. There is no need for details, precision, or certainty for the objectives to be set. We need a starting point to begin the process, and north, even uncertain, but yet the first definition of the north. This step doesn’t take more than a few hours.
Once I have their documents, identified by who has written and signed, I have the first compromise and I can move forward. I book a meeting with all the stakeholders. I choose a room where I can have a blank wall, a whiteboard, or a large-screen computer monitor. I bring post-its, pens, and sheets of paper.
I invite one by one to read their ideas, and I take notes for the most important things, on some tagging system, like post-it, computer-based applications, or cards over the table. Normally, this event lasts around a couple of hours at maximum, to build a common-sense model for what is the first vision for the values to be developed.
The leader should have the ability to extract most of the stakeholders, and their ideas to build, together and collaboratively, the first vision for an actual objective for the project process itself.
Besides the first definition of objectives, this meeting also should manage to solve the prioritization of those objectives, their importance, the value created for the organization, or other reasons the stakeholders agree to state.
The prioritization might be the hardest outgoing from this meeting, once everyone believes that his or her idea is the most important.
It is another ability for the leader to negotiate, analyze, and bring the group to an agreement that can minimally fulfill each personal goal. When we use agile thinking principles, those first objectives may be altered, along the process, due to the learning coming from the development process and other conditions that might bring new insights or some impediments.
The outcome of this step is the first approach to a work plan. The textual user story, as I call it, is the first commitment the stakeholders take with the leader and the project itself. It is actually the milestone where the project process really starts.
Even though agile management doesn’t talk about this step or user story as the first commitment. I use to call them textual user stories, once they bring the highest-level description for the ideas, wishes, and goals coming from the organization and the stakeholders.
All this step may seem to be a little bureaucratic, but it showed me that it is not a waste of time, but an inversion of the first discussion and the first milestone for the whole project process. My own experience showed me that this first step helps to align the stakeholders toward common objectives.
The textual user stories may evolve and adapt too, as the project process brings new learnings. Agile principles advocate the ability to change, adapt, evolve, and use incremental development. It is a cycle to repeat along the process and lead all the effort for successful value creation.
From this point, the process begins with the definition of the objectives for the first development cycles. Those lead to use the next technique, the OKR (Objective and Key-Results), which I will bring its details at the next step description.
Example excerpts
Even though, I believe that textual user stories, as I am defining here, are pretty obvious for any professional, I will show some excerpts to exemplify how this technique could be used. I am using some simple examples, but I believe they will show how to use this artifact.
Example – Wine Inventory control
One liquor store sells a special selection of wines. The need to keep straight control of the inventory for those bottles, once each one is worth a lot of money, they are rare and need to be completely tracked from purchase until delivery to the customers.
The Organization’s top Manager writes: “Manage the top wine inventory, making available quantity in storage, the value paid to get each bottle, date of purchase, date of arrival, storage environment. For each bottle, I want the whole description, date of purchase, date of sale, how much the customer paid, and date of the delivery. I want to check the inventory anytime, for real remaining bottles.”.
The Financial Director writes: “I want the value paid for each bottle, date of purchase, and supplier. Plus, I want to tag who sold, the customer identification, sold price, method of payment, and date.”.
The security Office writes: “All personnel involved in the process for purchasing, storing, sale, and delivery to the final client, who accounted for the payment, and the dates that all processes occurred.”.
From those three textual user stories, we can detach the most important features described by the three stakeholders. This is the first commitment the stakeholders’ address for starting the project process and cycles.
This example is just part of a greater story about a project I managed for a fancy inn network. This part I highlight here, about the wine inventory, was a special request to control some special wine bottles that meant a lot to the owners, and they were afraid of any misconduct by some employees, as they had recently.
References
ABC01 – “The Agile Manifesto”, The Agile Business Consortium.
AMO01 – “Agile Manifesto”, agilemanifesto.org
Cm01 – COHN, Mike, “User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development”, Addison Wesley, USA, 2004.
MM01 – “Curso Gestão Ágil 2.0”, Mind Master, 2022.
Pi01 – PLATCHECK, Ivsen, “Project Engineering Using Agile Thinking”, Yoelgrego.blog, Brazil, 2023.
[SS01] – SCHWABER, Ken & SUTHERLAND, Jeff, “The Scrum Guide”, Scrum Org, 2020.