1. Agile Management of Mega-Projects
March 2018
Think Simple, Run Faster

2. Agenda What is Agile and when should we use it
What is a mega-project and why it is not agile
TMG – Tactical Management Group
Recreating Agile conditions
Tool for the Job

3. Agile Edge Conditions Agile Region Hard Civil Infrastructure
Construction
Military/Aerospace Assembly
M&A
Legal
Semi-conductors
Dependency type
PCB
HR-intense
Industrial controls
Firm-ware
Re-org SW
Agile Region IT
Soft
.com
Cheap
Error fixing cost
Expensive

4. VUCA Pressure Market Needs Market Expects VUCA
“Requirements change faster then we can deliver, and stakeholders expects us to keep up, because they understand there are no hard limits”

5. Agile Elements for dealing with VUCA
Fast “market” feedback (extreme TTM)
Short term focus*
Design on-the-fly
Independent team
*In Israel it is the alternative to no planning, rather then long term planning that is too rigid

6. Mega-Project Expensive: 100s of man-years / $B in tangibles
Complicated: Many teams, many sites, many stakeholders
Long: Years of work, often with strict deadlines
Dependencies between many moving parts
Mistakes can be very costly
Very waterfall

7. TMG: Tactical Management Group
Mgmt.
TMG
Work Teams
Closely-knitted leadership for the project
360 view: PM, PO, Dev, QA, Arch, UX, IT…
Create Agile conditions for work teams (feedback, independence, less docs, focused work)

8. Get fast to Feedback Requirements Specifications Develop Integrate
Test
Deploy
MVP with Excellent Design
Feedback-based incremental iterations

9. Excellent MVP Design & Execution
Value Mgmt.
Tangible Design
Stake-holder feedback (miniDR)
Tactical Arch.
Rough Planning
Develop MVP with Excellent Design
Well-Groomed Backlogs
TMG Sprints

10. Value Management Do! Really Try Delay Don’t Focus Matrix 5 8 1 6
Business Value 3 2 4 7 9 5
Cost, Risk, Effort

11. Tactical Architecture
Minimize dependencies
Split to sub-parts: projects, products, services
Single site/team as owner
Small number of integration milestones

12. Rough Planning Back-of-the-envelope capacity planning
Capture Main dependencies
Understand general timeline and budget
Track changes

13. Tangible design & Stakeholder feedback

14. TMG Tracking: MSM Milestones Risks Budget Stakeholders Changes
Action Items

15. Summary Mega-projects are not naturally Agile
We can (sometimes) re-create Agile environment
The reward is very high: TTM, focus, control, value
TMG is a key success factor
A good tool can really help

16. Thanks, and keep it…