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Agile Project Management (AgilePM) Practitioner

Overview
Scenario:

Hoy Hall Hotel Refurbishment Project

Note:
Hoy Hall, a historic, timber-framed building dating from the 17th century, was originally the residence of the Lords of the Manor of Hoytown. The building is registered as a Heritage Building of Special Interest and is subject to restrictions in terms of development. Used as a hotel for over a century, it has recently fallen into disrepair, and for two years it has been completely unused, accelerating its deterioration. The local community has formed the Action Group "Hoy for Hoy Hall" to save the building, and wants to be closely involved in its future success.

After much discussion Hoy Hall has been purchased by Architecture Angels (AA), a small company whose directors are experienced hoteliers. Five years ago they decided to move into the property renovation business and have recently restored two other similarly-endangered buildings for use as hotels.

Architecture Angels are keen to both support local businesses and to have local people run their hotels, giving them a significant amount of autonomy to do this. To maintain core consistency, the hotels use Architecture Angels' Head Office services, such as IT operations, accounting, payroll, stocktaking, compliance, human resources and property management. The Head Office is based 80 miles from Hoy Hall.

Recently Architecture Angels commenced an Agile project to renovate Hoy Hall, which has a large downstairs hall and reception area, and 20 potential bedrooms upstairs. The roof requires extensive repairs and the electrical and plumbing installations require complete replacement. The 40 acres of land around the site are overgrown and need to be restored, and the driveway needs re-laying.

In the hotel industry, the trend for direct customer bookings via the internet has had a major impact on the growth of those hotels with this facility. Online booking now accounts for around 80% of room bookings, with only 20% being made via walk-in and telephone enquiries. Before Hoy Hall can open for business, a reservation system must be fully operational.

Architecture Angels use contractors to manage such work and have good relationships with two local companies: Timber Tigers (TT) who will handle the internal works, and Earth Excavations (EE) who will handle the gardens.

A Project Manager, who has since left the company, started the Feasibility phase. This phase has been continued by the Senior Management Team, which consists of the Sales, Marketing, and Finance Directors and the Chief Executive. This was scheduled to take a month and has almost been completed. A Feasibility Assessment has been produced. An Outline Business Case has been completed which assessed the project as being viable.

The Architecture Angels Senior Management Team will be responsible for Steering the project.

The table below shows the appointments planned for the project team and is subject to change.



Additional Information:
The project is approaching the end of Feasibility. The original Project Manager was involved in drafting a Delivery Plan for the project but not in the outline refurbishment options.

The Senior Management Team generated several options for the refurbishment. All the options included a landscaping solution for the gardens and re-laying of the driveway, as the solution will not be acceptable without these. However, the best solution for the refurbishment is still under debate. The new Project Manager has suggested that a Feasibility Prototype could consist of paper-based drawings for each option. The "Hoy for Hoy Hall" Action Group thinks that a physically-built representation is mandatory for a prototype and wants a small-scale model of the recommendation for the building. The time available to produce this, however, is limited.

Contracts for resources have not yet been signed and will be postponed until the chosen outline solution has been agreed.

XAN Insurance Company Web Project
Xan is a medium-sized insurance company with a worldwide customer base and a strong presence on the internet. Its website has been in operation for fifteen years. It operates from one location
- a large, open-plan office in the centre of a city. It is a friendly company with no separate private offices for individual managers. Staff members prefer to wander around the office space and have one-to-one chats rather than use email or have lots of meetings.

The Marketing Director is considering a project to develop a new area on the current web site to sell a new type of insurance directly to the proprietors of coffee bars, insuring them against minor accidents to staff and customers. The targeted coffee bars are privately-owned franchises and are mostly situated in railway stations, airports and shopping centres.

The Marketing Director has not yet decided whether the system will just provide information about insurance policies online and give quotations, the policies then being set up later by normal mailing and telephone contact. Alternatively, it may be possible for the system to provide the complete set-up and sale of an insurance policy online. In this case the system would need to enable the online capture and processing of credit card details and the issue of an insurance policy.

The Finance Director has budgetary control over all projects in the company and is reluctant to release finance for projects where the outcome, timeframe and benefits are not clear.

Because of the uncertainty about the amount of development and the length of time it may take, it is difficult to set a timeframe on this project. The Sales Manager, who reports to the Marketing Director, has insisted that the website extensions needed for this project must be operational within 12 weeks. The Sales Manager has a

You have been brought in to give advice on how an Agile Project Management approach can be used to keep control of this project and to ensure that it delivers something useful to the business within 12 weeks.

After a brief feasibility assessment, conducted by the Sales Manager, the Finance Director has decided to authorise a 12-week project with the objective of producing a prototype system for insurance for coffee bars, with a release at the end of that time. Six selected coffee bars have agreed to complete an insurance application form online, to trial the released website.

Overview
The companies and people within the scenario are fictional.

UniCo

Background

UniCo is an IT Services company which offers information management services and installation of large-scale computer systems. The company has grown rapidly and has been successful. However in recent years UniCo has lost market share due to increased competition from a growing number of similar providers. There is also an increasing client demand for mobile applications and more innovative solutions.

Current situation

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has made a strategic decision to reposition UniCo in the market place. It will become a leading provider of innovative solutions, including mobile applications. The CEO knows that pursuing this new strategy will mean some loss of personal control in UniCo as he will no longer have the expertise to make decisions on all aspects of the technology, but believes the strategic shift is both necessary and urgent.

Two months ago, in line with the new strategy, UniCo acquired a company called Selco. Selco is a small, dynamic company that specializes in developing mobile applications. The plan is to keep the 10 Selco staff together as an intact team. They will still be managed by the founder of Selco, who will become the Applications Manager within UniCo.

The resulting UniCo structure is shown in the Organization Chart on the next page.

In order for UniCo to achieve its new business priorities and meet the changing customer demands, UniCo staff need to learn from their new Selco colleagues. They must develop both new capabilities and the new attitudes needed for UniCo to offer more innovative solutions to its customers. This may not happen easily, because some UniCo staff members are not enthusiastic about the change in focus of UniCo's business.

So far, very little integration has taken place. The former Selco staff still work from an office on the other side of town from the UniCo office. In order to make progress UniCo needs to realign business processes and systems, and to complete the integration of Selco.

The UniCo Sales Director has some experience of the mobile applications market and has recently won a large contract with a Utilities company to provide mobile solutions for their workforce. This is a great opportunity for UniCo to prove it can be successful in this new type of business.

Next steps

A programme has been established to manage this change. This consists of the following workstreams:

1. Operational delivery processes - The Operations Director will manage

* the integration of the Selco staff (now the Applications area) with UniCo's IT systems and work practices, and
* the relocation of the Selco staff to the UniCo office.

2. Business processes - The Customer Services Director will manage the introduction of new processes across the business to ensure end-to-end alignment of the new capability and services to be offered.
3. Rebranding UniCo - The Marketing Manager will lead the work to reposition UniCo in the market place.
4. Capability and skills development - The Human Resources (HR) Manager will lead the work to upskill people so they are prepared and able to take advantage of the new opportunities resulting from this change.



Additional Information:

The Marketing Manager is reviewing what needs to be done to implement the workstream for the market repositioning and rebranding of UniCo. Marketing staff have interviewed people at all levels in the organization to identify potential ideas and barriers. Key items have been identified as follows:

* UniCo has an excellent brand perception within the market and many existing staff feel that this existing brand will be damaged by the inclusion of Selco

* Internally, the Customer Services and IT Support managers and the Corporate Services Director, are not as committed to the rebranding as the Operations and Sales Directors

* A recent positive press article about the future direction of UniCo has been promoted on social media forums and has been well received and redistributed by staff

* At a company meeting the CEO admitted to being initially apprehensive about losing some personal control over the new direction for UniCo. However, the CEO enthusiastically explained how UniCo and Selco together will be much stronger in the market, especially following successful rebranding, and why the CEO is now able to support the change. Staff have appreciated this openness and it has been the subject of many informal discussions throughout the company.

The Sales Director has noted that there is some tension amongst the Sales Director's management team,
particularly between those Sales Managers who have been at UniCo a long time and two new Managers who joined recently. This is of concern as it means the team is not working as effectively as it could.

The Sales Director has held one-to-one discussions with each Sales Manager in order to:

* try to understand the underlying tensions and put measures in place to help them become a more effective team.

The extract below is from of the Sales Director's notes on the discussions, and includes the proposed plans to address the issues:
1. The most common complaint across the whole of the Sales management team was the time spent on internal processes, territorial conflicts between sales regions and which industries should be targeted. Commitment was lacking to the change management actions needed to increase the sales value to UniCo.

Plan: Arrange a Sales management event so that the Sales Managers can share their personal vision and priorities.
2. There are underlying tensions because new Sales Managers are doing some of the work that the longer-term Sales Managers would have been doing. Nobody has wanted to raise this at the Sales management team meetings as it was felt that they would not be taken seriously and it would affect how others viewed them.
2. There are underlying tensions because new Sales Managers are doing some of the work that the longer-term Sales Managers would have been doing. Nobody has wanted to raise this at the Sales management team meetings as it was felt that they would not be taken seriously and it would affect how others viewed them.

Plan: Agree individually with each Sales Manager a list of key tasks they are expected to fulfil and share these separately with the others in Sales management.
3. It has been a while since the last Sales management team meeting and some members have not completed the actions agreed to resolve outstanding issues, which has led to delays. There is a belief that these issues will not be resolved even if they are discussed again at the next Sales management team meeting.

Plan: Acknowledge the failure to complete previous actions and get all team members to debate and jointly agree a plan to implement future actions.

4. This is the first time the Sales staff have faced major disruption to the normal sales processes. The Sales Director learned that some sales teams are not adopting the changes needed to support the sale of the mobile applications now being developed and marketed. However, the Sales Managers have not yet discussed and resolved this failure of some to deliver on commitments between themselves.

Plan: Ask the Sales Manager team members to take it in turns to attend meetings of other functional departments to gain more understanding of the organizational processes.