SPA2005 session: Heuristics for project success

One-line description:Exploring heuristics about the culture and organization of a project and the impact this has project success.
 
Session format: Workshop [read about the different session types]
 
Abstract:Project culture and organization can have as big, if not bigger, influence on the success of a project than the method, language or platform used for a project. For example:
- configuration management: How do you work with it, what is controlled there, branching, testing;
- file structure: How do you organize all your stuff, or your source, how does this match with your tools;
- documentation: What is being documented, how is that done, what is avoided, what is helpful;
- meetings: For what purposes do you meet with whom, how often and long, how do these meetings look like;
- daily schedule: Do you plan for lunch with colleagues, private thinking time;
- rooms. How is your team seated, how does this work;
- team: how is the work divided, how are individuals measured and rewarded.

This session is intended to be a workshop to discover the impact of project culture and organization on project success (or failure) and to document heuristics for elements of project culture and organization discovered during the workshop.
 
Audience background:Developers, Architects and Managers who have worked on software projects, in a variety of environments (though this isn't strictly necessary at least some people like this would make this a better session).
 
Benefits of participating:1. To examine one's own and others project culture/organization experiences;
2. To be able to determine what is bad or good culture/organization;
3. Understand how to tackle bad culture/organization and how to successfully introduce changes in culture.
 
Materials provided:Slides for setting the scene and displaying the timetable, Flip-charts & Pens.
 
Process:The session will be structured in a such a way to scale up or down to the size of the audience, for example a small audience would continue to work as a single team through the workshop, for a larger group a number of teams can be created to examine specific areas of interest or experience.

00:00 - 00:15 Introduction:

00:00 - 00:15 State the purpose of the session, provide an introduction to possible areas of interest and note the current state of literature covering subject.

00:15 - 00:50 Gathering and filtering audience's experience:

00:15 - 00:35 Brainstorm, to mine the audience's experience of project culture/organization, in particular those elements that have caused difficulty on a project or have changed with positive effect.

00:35 - 00:50 a filtering exercise on the Brainstorm to concentrate on a small number of project culture/organization elements, the number of subjects put forward for further exploration will depend on the size of the audience (and the resultant number of teams).

00:50 - 01:00 Break

01:00 - 01:55 Defining heuristics:

For a larger audience:

01:00 - 01:30 Teams will be chosen and then the teams will elaborate the subjects chosen during the filtering process resulting in an outline set of heuristics.

Identify the good and bad elements.

How to recognize these elements, looking for symptoms, both positive and negative.

What actions can be taken to correct bad elements of culture/organization, how to replace something negative with something positive.

01:30 - 01:55 Presentation of the elaboration exercise and Heuristics to the group by the teams, this will provoke more discussion and so will add to those areas already elaborated.

For a smaller audience:

01:00 - 01:55 The subjects will be elaborated and discussed as a single team resulting in an outline set of heuristics.

01:55 - 02:05 Break

02:05 - 02:20 Render the subject elaboration into checklists or patterns (this depending on the nature and experience of the audience and the output achieved).

02:20 - 02:30: Session wrap-up and collection of materials.

Contingency: Additional tasks (if time available during the workshop):

- Identify patterns in the session outputs
- Create a pattern language for the elements of project culture discussed.
- Detail each pattern with the source and heuristics from the session.
- Detail corrective actions for the bad patterns.
 
Outputs:The session will result in a set of heuristics covering elements of project culture/organization, the influence on projects, how to identify them and possible remedial action in Poster form.

This information will also be posted to the website.

For those participants who are interested an email will be sent inviting them to review (and add to) the website content.
 
History:
 
Presenters
1. Tony Barrett-Powell
Oracle Corporation UK Ltd.
2. Klaus Marquardt
Dräger Medical AG
3.