Mobility Projects and Project Mangement Methodologies : Adapt alongwith Agile

            The proliferation of mobile devices, advancement in technology, advent of Cloud, demand of people and mobile workforce have imposed a new challenge on enterprises to think and launch multiple projects in Mobility to cater to the demand. At the same time, it is evident that, the success of projects will depend on how the enterprises and data are structured and processed in the backend and how seamlessly the new channel of mobile can fetch and render the data to the end users. 

            Hence, in this aspect, the projects can really be divided in 3 phases and in my view different project management models need to be adapted to meet the requirement with the core phase aligned towards Agile methodologies. There cannot be a single sacrosanct model for success for all phases.

Explore Phase :

In this phase, enterprises try to explore the real need, establishing the customer base, ROI model and business value. It is time to cut the flab, establish the reality from the myths which are doing rounds in the nascent stage of Mobility. This is a long cycle and highly debated and is best managed by Strategic leadership in consultation with SMEs. It also needs to be strongly backed by collaborating efforts from Marketing Departments insights and research, funding allocation from Finance and supported and governed by Portfolio management.

Develop Phase:

Once the customer base and high level projects are approved, it is time to turn the vision into reality and the real projects come into life. Organizations need to choose the right model for the execution of the projects. 

i ) Project Management model :

Lets consider the scope of Mobility projects as the projects which will deliver the value of access of data to the devices. In that case, in my opinion, Agile methodology should be adapted by the orginazations. If the projects need a transformation project in the infrastructure itself, traditional waterfall models/iterative models should be right fit for the transformation part which can be further sub-contracted and the presentation to devices should be taken in the Agile way. My viewpoint are driven from the challenges of projects and which are handled better in what methodologies : 

Parameters	Value	Agile Methodology	Waterfall Model
Requirements Volatility	High	Y	N
Availability of SMEs	Low – pair programming will ensure “first time right” and cross-pollination of knowledge	Y	N
Stability of Technical Blueprint	Low – This enforces frequent change of requirements and quick adaptability and flexibility is favoured more in Agile compared to Change Requests.	Y	N
Duration of projects	Short – though the small duration projects can be handled in both methodologies, but other factors weigh in more for Agile. But, from this perspective, the effect is somewhat neutral.	Y	Y
Value delivery and customer touchpoints	High – The profile of projects require continuous delivery to customers for early feedback and hence, continuous integration is also mandatory, which weighs more in favour of Agile.	Y	N

2. Financial model
   If the projects are run under contract, better financial model will be “Time and Material” compared to “Fixed Price Project” as the former will provide better flexibility to accommodate requirement volatility.

3. Project Manager or Technical Manager

If the projects are run in Agile mode and teams are self-managed, there is a question whether a full time Project Management Professional is required or not. In my opinion, Technical Project Manager who is well connected with Technology nuances and can connect with the team on ground and well versed in management techniques will be a right fit for the role of Project Manager.

3. Support Phase 

Designing the right model for Support for the products/services offered is also extremely critical. As the size of the projects are small, but the variety of support requirement for different apps for different platforms are high, keeping dedicated people with right skillset becomes an enormous cost for the enterprises who offer the services. So, unless the number of projects and customers are high, time-sharing will not work and setup of Helpdesks become a costly affair. This is where, niche Mobility players struggle and traditional Service Providers working on an outsourced model score higher. Before embarking the journey of mobility, enterprises must think of the Support and maintainability structure considering the following parameters.

• Requirement of users and volume

• Criticality of the mobile channel (e.g. if it involves financial gateway integration etc)

• Availability of alternative channels like web
• IP Protection

• Total Cost of Ownership etc.

© Pallab Sen, 2012

Disclaimer : The views are personal and based on my experience.

Ramp-up plan for a Mobility CoE

Many small and large organizations are trying to place their feet in the booming market of Enterprise / Consumer Mobility or mobile applications. While the complexity of creating a small application is pretty simple compared to solving big ticket IT problems, but the dynamics of this world of Mobility poses the challenges of fast scaling, right sustenance model, various engagement models etc.

In the following article, I am trying to present a depiction of the challenges and a model growth strategy which the organizations might adopt to achieve a strategic goal of ramp up a 100 member team in a span of 1year. The figures below are imaginary and in reality will be governed by organization's strategic focus areas and growth target.

Challenges are plenty !!

 

• Business Plan and approval

•Infrastructure Setup

•Knowledge Management framework

•Quality Management

•Operations Management

•Business Continuity Plan and DR

•Risk Management

 

Effective planning and execution hold the key to success

We should define very short term, medium term and long term goals to effectively implement the plans and measure the progress at periodic intervals

30 day plan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    90 day plan

180 day plan – Focus on implementation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knowledge Management Framework

 

While the plans are implemented, there should be a right structure for knowledge management framework or sub-CoEs within the Mobility CoE to meet the demand of the customers and also to keep the team abreast with the latest happenings in the world of technology. 

 

Infrastructure Management challenges

1. Seating places across locations

2. Lab setup and access across locations

◦Hardware procurement

◦Software licensing

◦Network setup

3. Security considerations/ leased line setups for ODC access 

 

Operations Management challenges

•Deal Pipeline Management and utilization of resources

•Alignment with HR and contractors for fast demand management – ready reference of talent pool.

•Alignment with Sales teams and embedding of target for mobile sales in account’s sales target.

•Legal counsel for Agreements with Alliance partners, compliance with external country laws

•Overseas operations

•Pool of key resources of Consultants/ Tech Archs/Tech leads to make them travel-ready to customer places

•Business Continuity Plan / Disaster Recovery plan 

 

 

Project Management challenges in Mobile Applications Delivery

                 All of us are aware that the façade of Mobility Application development is being uncovered every day. New challenges are thrown from fast evolving mobile devices and the corresponding capabilities offered by these devices and underlying platforms to transform the way we think, the way we operate small and big tasks. The umpteen number of possibilities of applications and demand from customers and who in turn are enterprise users as well, many niche start-ups as well as established Service providers willing to capture the pie of huge Enterprise Mobility market ( predicted to be around 8 bn USD by 2016) are facing some unique challenges from Project Management perspective.   

1.       Knowledge Management and training owing to Short shelf-life of Technology

               As the technology landscape and equilibrium shifts very fast e.g. Blackberry and J2ME/Symbian enabled smart phones to iPhone to iPad to Android with each operating system and MEAP platforms providing different APIs, SDKs to develop the applications, companies need to keep a pool of resources to cater to the demand of the enterprises and also always need to reskill the employees. This reskilling poses other challenges like

a.       Better knowledge management framework

b.      Alignment with right Training providers or Train-the-trainer program to cut costs on training of new technologies.

c.       Infrastructure and license setup for different technologies

2.       Lack of historical metrics

              There is hardly any baseline w.r.t. what should be the developer productivity to create an application. This hurts in putting the right cost in bidding process and there is a huge variance even when no product/platforms are used. The equation becomes more complex as there are many MEAP platforms available which claim to ease the job of the developers, but none of them are fully complementary to the demand of enterprises. As the platforms mature, the service providers are also trying to gather metrics on top of it, but it is pretty inadequate at this moment to establish any correlation which poses a challenge on the delivery as well as Sales team to price the end solutions.

3.       Mix of business process/domain awareness coupled with technology

               In Enterprise Mobility, the applications are developed to mobilize the business processes belonging to each domain e.g. Banking and Financial Services, Insurance , Manufacturing, Healthcare, Supply Chain Management, Media and Telecom etc. Large enterprises have already aligned their delivery units also according to these domains to cater to specific customer needs and have developed specialized knowledge on them. As Mobility is evolving in terms of technology, many organizations are forming Centre of Excellence in silos which focuses on the development of the mobile technology, but the solutions developed by them doesn’t attract customers as they deemed impractical after hitting market due to lack of contribution from domain SMEs. So, few organizations are thinking to move towards a Mobility CoE within each domain to develop the right solution, but will there be a sufficient demand to cover the cost separate setup? What’s the right and optimal way of operation is a question management is trying to solve.

4.       Scale up to maintenance challenges

                  While the application/product providers might always argue that the developers of the technology and applications will be able to support them best, but in many practical cases I have found that the myth is not right. That’s not because of neither of their unwillingness to support nor due to lack of customer commitment, but arises of the fact of challenge to scale up and prioritize. Quite often, maintenance activities and demands are ad-hoc and niche companies cannot scale-up to these demands unless they have vendor agreement with service provider companies and the training materials etc really documented well. In this case, pure play service providers play a better role when they have the “partnership” setup with the product providers. They have the flexibility to move the people to other projects when the demand recedes.

5.       Optimizing the Operating Margin

                The question "what's the optimal Operating Margin" haunts the VCs , the companies, the executives everyone. While the project management team at the ground level demands a low OM to start with as they need to build the reusable off-the shelf components, investments due to training and infrastructure, for sponsors specially for public listed companies, ROI is the key thing which drives. So, a clearly laid out business plan is a must to survive the battle. Some VC promoted companies even operate at zero to negative OM to garner initial customers and here there is a challenge in front to established players to stay competitive. Obviously, the other differentiators and value propositions, establishing TCO model comes handy to combat this battle.