Project Managers, What Should You Take On The Way To Your Agile Journey? - Part 1 - Project Selection Criteria Knowledge

Post date: Apr 7, 2015 9:29:58 AM

You are a project manager, well versed in applying classical project management methods such as PMI and PRINCE2 and now you see yourself transitioning to agile project management (Scrum, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)) or some other agile flavor.

Lots of articles and forums tell what you should change about the way you think and the approaches you apply. But..there are some things that you can use right away - as you know them - only in a slightly different context - with guaranteed success. What are these things? These will be explored in this series.

First of all there are the classical financial measures you used when prioritizing and selecting projects that are part of a program or portfolio:

Net Present Value (NPV)

Internal Rate of Return (IRR)

Discounted Payback Period

These forecasts apply very well to User Stories for a duration of a year, a year and a half at best and they all can be used in order to determine the priority of a user story according to business value. This way you have a common approach to compare two user stories from your backlog and know how you can prioritize them.

As a second level in prioritization of these stories, you can bring your enterprise environmental factors into play and assess the overall risk tolerance of the organization in order to prioritize optimally.

And there is more that you already possess and can apply right away, stay tune for the next aspects...