Welding Robotics
I got a call from a recruiter while on vacation and flew back to Columbus, Ohio to be the first project manager (6 month convertible contract) for a 150 engineer startup that has been actively building welding robots for 6 years. My project role was to manage a new product development, a 4 armed robot, that lead engineers has been considering the project plan and design on before I arrived.
Walking through the door, the project delivery date was already 2 months behind MSA schedule. Through the Director of Engineering, I was handed an agenda for meetings with stakeholders across the company, and through a couple of workshops with him and a member of the product team, I was introduced to the process and standards that the engineering teams had created over the years.
With no formal PMO, my initial call to action was to develop a project charter and define the critical path of the 4-arm project (through information held on JIRA, Confluence, recent presentations, and meeting notes), introduce methods that could support project planning accuracy (RAID, mitigations, scenario planning), make recommendations and lead them to reduce the delivery time (2 months of delay on a 6 month timeline), and run lead engineering Scrum of Scrum meetings (design, architecture, software development, testing) .
JIRA Review, Product Bugs, and Stakeholder Meetings
I arrived at the office and got established with a name badge, endpoint, and began to review my assignment in Teams. There was an agenda of 15 meetings with stakeholders laid out for me to accomplish in the first 6 days on the job, in addition to attending meetings with lead engineers, Scrum of Scrums, and the requirements to produce a project charter, capture notes, update RAID, and presentation deck within the first week. After work, during the evenings I went through 2,000 JIRA stories and tasks to understand the company, my engineer leads’ teams’ work, and identified 12 enabling stories and product bugs that hadn’t been logged in RAID, or considered in the project timeline. During stakeholder meetings, one of these bugs was raised to the product team as a major product design, hardware, or functionality issue that may or may not need to be redeveloped.
Project Charter Development
Through leveraging multiple disparate sources of information, I pulled together a strong Project Charter, within the first two days of the assignment, including a high-level critical path of connected stories across the 6 month project timeline. I inserted the project charter into a presentation deck to support the Director of Engineering’s upcoming bi-monthly review with Executive Leadership. Only 2 days in, it was difficult to determine the accuracy of story estimates without engaging directly with the team’s sprint planning meetings, and there was missing information on JIRA, like mitigation plans for project risks, sizing of mitigation plans, and hand-offs between teams. This led to me to begin testing readiness for a “Lite Scaled Agile” approach — via proposal with Director of Engineering.
Scaled Agile (PI Planning)
My proposal for a Lite Scaled Agile approach was presented, reviewed, and approved by the Director of Engineering. I outlined a mostly immediate Planning Increment agenda (within 2 weeks), with one-on-one PI preparation meetings with each of the lead engineers, which including a list of questions that would help them prepare to present (to just the engineering leads and a few stakeholder invitations), collaborate in breakout sessions (for handoff discussions and planning), and meet directly with stakeholders that they would be passing work to (example: testing and operations) to ensure alignment of expectations and product requirements (accurate testing plans). My lite scaled agile approach increased the meeting size by 5 relevant stakeholders per 8 week PI event, and included best practices for Lead Engineering teams’ PI Preparation.