Recently, there is a thread which growing with enthusiasts looking forward about agile or scrum project management. It is useful for software development, but for construction? For me, agile or scrum (known hereafter as scrum) project management is a fancy name or a marketing niche for PMI to promote the second tier in project management after their PMP program, or worst; a definite term as micromanagement. None would want to be involved in micromanagement especially when we put management into its retrospective which is so often filled with bureaucracy, paperwork nonsense and needless responsibilities. I reckon the conservative construction project management as the most agile project management. It crosses the demarcation of agility within project management. The word agile itself is self-explanatory which emphasizes the ability to adapt into conditions which are not routinely performed. Nevertheless, the artifacts within scrum project management still remain conservative involving routines. The introduction of sprint backlog is nothing more than a section or part of a product backlog (work breakdown structure; WBS) of a conventional work program in gantt chart format which a scrum masters or a project manager will dictate in order to complete critical task. The conventional work program allows you to do similar action when we look at the critical path to clear impediments to the overall progress. Better, conventional work programs which run on monte carlo simulation will assist better with graphical aid and considers provided slack and lag. Overall, the introduction of scrum bring a new whole level of slavery where members of a project will have to provide their own burndown chart in order to commit and time their delivery. This burndown chart is indeed a waste of time when it comes to its efficiency. The time used to estimate productivity itself is a wastage and imagine doing it in daily basis. Secondly, you have to consider possible risk or slack in every sprint and lastly, each sprint maybe useful once if projects are highly customized, depending on client briefs and requirements. I still hold to the conventional planning and project management. Project managers are agile when he can detect or trace opportunities when he understood the relationships among tasks within his work program. The critical path suffice the need for any micromanagement and leveraging of resources when it comes to mitigation plan or when you are replenish with resources to crash ahead. In project management, fanciful terms have no significance. It is the overall result and the process delivery. Have you ever wonder why some 'ah peks' can fast track while those accredited PMP can't? It is all about the experience you have when encountering problems and that particular god called money. |
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