An Agile PM is responsible for managing the resouces, time, and scope that make up a project to ensure that a quality product is delivered within the desired schedule and budget. A Chingu PM doesn't just coordinate the project. She also acts as a member of the development team writing code, testing the app, and creating documentation.
An important difference between a PM in a corporate setting and yourselves is that since we are operating in a volunteer environment, just like every Open Source project, you are also a coach, a motivator, and a role model. We can't order our team mates; We must establish an environment that motivates them to be both innovative and productive.
In your role as a Chingu Project Manager, your most important two tasks are to understand your team's needs and to remove any obstacles blocking their progress. This requires a large amount of communication and a deep understanding of what resources, including people, are available in the Chingu organization.
When you start a new project, one of the first things you'll need to do is to define the tasks that must be completed to meet the project's goals. As a PM, the very first step is to brainstorm with your team to define who your users are, the value the app will bring to each of them, and the high-level components of the app responsible for delivering this value.
Once you've done this, the next step is to start defining more discrete tasks and adding them to your project backlog. What is a "backlog"? Very simply, it's just a place where you maintain the tasks your project needs to complete, but which haven't yet been started. Agile projects organize themselves around a project board that consists of the following vertical lanes:
- Backlog - The stories we know we need to do, but haven’t gotten to yet.
- Next - The stories we know need to be performed in the next Sprint. If we complete all the stories in the current sprint, we’ll go here to get more work before dipping into the backlog.
- In Progress - The stories that have to be completed in the current Sprint. Don’t overload this with stories! At the beginning of the Sprint, you’ll need to decide as a team what needs to be done in the upcoming sprint.
- Blocked - Stories that have been started, but can’t be completed due to an unfulfilled dependency on another story, or due to a decision that needs to be made, or a technical issue. These should be resolved as quickly as feasible so you don’t accumulate technical debt.
- Done - Stories that have been completed. It’s important to move a story card to this lane only when the story is fully completed - coded, tested, and promoted to your release branch.
This is also known as a Kanban board and it imposes a workflow to your project that gives you visibility to the progress of the project based on the state of its tasks.
Once you have an idea of what very high-level components make up your project, you will need to start defining the tasks that must be completed to build them. In traditional Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) project management methodologies, the result was called the work breakdown structure (WBS), which was typically just a list of the tasks, their relationship to one another, and estimate of time for completion, and who they were assigned to. In SDLC all tasks were defined at the start of the project, allowing the project manager to provide an accurate estimate of cost and target date for the project. However, over time it has been proven that for many types of projects this highly structured and rigid approach simply doesn't work.
Agile project management (of which Scrum is one methodology) is based on the fact that "you don't know what you don't know" at the start of the project and as you progress, more details will surface that you'll need to react and adapt to. Agile methodologies are based on the following principles which contrast them to traditional SDLC approaches:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan