Case Study: AgilePM Drives Value Prioritisation

Certification: AgilePM

Accredited Training Organisation: QRP International

Smals is the joint ICT organisation of Belgium’s public social security institutions. It realises innovative ICT projects and services in the line of work, family and health for social security and healthcare institutions and offers them a wide range of ICT services.

ICT for society is not just a slogan for Smals; they participate in pioneering work in e-government and e-health in Belgium and are an important contributor to the digital transformation of social security and healthcare. Smals is also active in the development of the G-Cloud, the Belgian government cloud.

The team within the SharePoint Competence Centre was seeking an agile method to support their projects and development initiatives, and improve the delivery and success rates of projects. Members of the team were aware of the Scrum approach, but also its limitations, being primarily designed for software development teams. The team had previously tried to implement Scrum on projects, but it wasn’t able to provide everything they required.

The team needed a more mature, comprehensive Agile approach which also integrates project management, which would allow them to better involve the business representatives in projects to ensure the team is working on the initiatives and projects that deliver most benefits and value.

The Smals team adopted the AgilePM framework, arranging training for core project team members. The aim was to ensure that the approach was well understood on both client and supplier sides and to encourage maximum engagement.

Sprint review/sprint planning meetings were organised every fortnight for each of the projects, which meant that one project would be dealt with one week and the other the next, and so on. One of the two business ambassadors would automatically attend the other’s meetings to ensure consistency in decisions. Every day there was also a 15-minute stand-up meeting involving the project team (business and technical representatives).

The team organised a monthly one-hour project board to ensure transparency and monitoring of progress. Once this monitoring structure was in place, the project almost ran itself!

At the end of each project, the team carried out a remote lessons-learned exercise, incorporating lessons into future projects.

The first key challenge for the team was that of coaching, ensuring team members familiar and comfortable with the AgilePM approach.

The second key challenge was ensuring that the project team followed the rules, the vision and the principles. A developer who was very good technically was, for example, not convinced by the AgilePM approach and was sceptical at first. But he finally played the game and was able to see the logic of the approach, especially as relations between the project team and the business were performing better than they had done previously.

Client expectations must be managed with care. In the past, clients would expect the project to progress (and results materialise) quickly without setting a deadline. It is vital to brief the client at the initial stage of the project, ensuring transparency, open communication, and managed expectations.

The first project on which the Smals team applied the AgilePM approach concerned a Belgian social security institution that wanted to renew two applications, which previously existed in Lotus Notes, into SharePoint applications. The team was delighted with the results.

During the project kick-off meeting, the AgilePM approach was explained, key roles and responsibilities were assigned, and the high-level approach to the project was outlined and agreed.

At the end of the kick-off meeting, the team gave the business the task of creating a first version of the backlog by describing their requirements and prioritising them according to the MoSCoW prioritisation technique (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have this time). The challenge was to designate 60% of the total project effort as must-haves, which can prove difficult as the team would often see 70-80% of requirements designated as must-haves in the first round.

The client appreciated working in an agile way. It allows the business to be much more involved in the project and in day-to-day decisions. It is not unusual for the client to think something is simple, but being more involved makes them better understand the task and associated challenges.

Conversely, the developers have a better understanding of the underlying needs. The AgilePM approach allows for transparent dialogue and the right choices to be made, without the development teams getting hung up on things that are not so important to the client/business.

The team managed to deliver quickly and within three months were ready to go live with the new application.

The most useful AgilePM feature for the Smals team is the MoSCoW prioritisation technique, a popular technique for prioritising project tasks and requirements. This prioritisation ensure that the project team remains focused on the items and features that deliver most value to the project and the client.