Practical know-how of the Global Project

Hitoshi Goto

Ukihiko Takagi

In Part18, we discussed the points that make multi-vendor global projects successful. This part, we will look at the points of “Agile development” in global projects.

"Agile development" that management is difficult even in Japan

Agile development, if done well, will not only enable early release and phased release of the system, but also avoid the cost increase due to rework, but in practice it is quite difficult to manage.

As it is difficult even in Japan, it will become increasingly difficult for global projects. However, in a large-scale global project (total budget of several billion yen) we are involved, there are successful cases despite the participating members are their varying nationalities. Let's introduce the know-how.

First, as in general agile development, the following measures were taken.

Organize multiple small teams under an excellent manager

• Configure a team that has a small turn
• Assign highly independent members responsible for their own tasks

Schedule setting prior to development cycle

• One cycle of agile development (specification confirmation, development, testing, function review, update & re-review) was defined as three weeks
• Execute projects with review of functional areas that can be handled in 3 weeks
• Pre-planning for scheduled review dates with priority on schedule

Timely sharing of progress and issues

• Information sharing such as progress in a morning session for 30 minutes every morning, scheduled tasks, issues, etc.
  →Realization of timely work follow-up by manager

Use web tools because they can not check face to face

In addition, we had approach only to global projects that were different from general agile development. In general, we bring together users, consultants, developers, etc. in one place so that we can quickly make daily adjustments and specification checks, but this is not the case with global projects. Therefore we took the following measures.

Integrate progress management, issue management and language unification using web tools

• Use web tools for progress management and issue management
• Send notification to related parties automatically whenever there is a task or an issue, a change of person in charge, update of progress, etc.
  →Always share the same information among all members
• Unified description language

As mentioned before, in project management overseas, preference is given to the use of tools, and in Agile development this is a more effective measure.

<<Read [Part 18]

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