Unit 3

Detailed Class Breakdown

Class plan: 90 minutes

The sections below describe the dynamics of each part of the class:

Memo writing guidelines - 15'

This section starts with an introduction to memo writing, purpose, outline, writing style in order to prepare the students for the assigned memos they have to submit throughout the semester.

Exercise 1: Planning a cathedral in the 13th century - 20'

Students are asked to imagine that they live in the 13th century, and that they work for the master builder or architect of a grand cathedral. Their assigned exercise is this: discuss what would go into a plan for building the cathedral? What might such a plan look like, in practical terms of documentation?

Students are divided into teams of 4-5 people. Each team has seven minutes to develop a plan - an approach to doing the work. At the end of the exercise the group reconvenes to talk about the approaches that students came up with.

As the students' plans are presented, the role of the educator is to point out unstated assumptions that might not be true. What if the stone isn't available in the quantities thought? What if the ground starts to sink under one pillar? What if the economy shrinks and the tithing is smaller than assumed?

The overall purpose of these interventions is to make students realise that very detailed plans often cannot be delivered as originally designed, and that there is a cost to rigidly enforcing them as situations change.

Lecture: Waterfall and pre-planning approaches: strengths and weaknesses - 15'

Governments have traditionally tried to eliminate uncertainty in projects by planning them in as much detail as possible - for accountability and budget planning purposes. So before a government builds a highway it will usually calculate exactly how much steel, concrete and asphalt will be needed, how much it will cost, who will deliver it and when it will arrive.

The name given to project management approaches that try to plan all aspects of a project in advance of its delivery is waterfall.

Governments like to plan like this - using waterfall project management - for two reasons.

First, it enables decision-makers to know how much their decisions are going to cost, and the date at which those investments will start to yield. This allows those decision-makers to make informed choices and respond to accountability questions about what decisions have been made and why.

Secondly, governments like to plan this way simply because it is traditional. The traditions of detailed up-front planning are not only baked into public service tradition, but they're also baked into the structures of governments - linear policy making processes, budget sign-off process, business cases, procurement processes, and other parts of the machinery of state. All such processes assume that a government will normally make detailed up-front plans - waterfall plans- get them signed off, and then deliver.

Discussion: Why is a pre-planning approach preferred in government and for what types of projects is it a suitable approach? - 10'

Students are challenged to name projects for which detailed up front planning - waterfall planning - might be advantageous. The discussion is then stirred toward the virtues of such detailed planning, as well as its weaknesses.

Then students are be asked about the limitations of such approaches. Ideally students may be able to supply personal stories of planning processes that were too inflexible and didn't respond to changing circumstances. But if they cannot contribute these incidences from their own professional experience or internships, then they can be challenged to think about what might be the limits to a waterfall approach when designing a website for applying for unemployment benefits.

Lecture: Introducing agile project management

Agile project management gets its name from a specific document, rather than from the word 'agile' more generally

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, published in 2001 was not the first statement of new, fundamentally iterative approaches to project management, but it was catalytic in moving the ideas from niche parts of the private sector to a wider audience. It argued for an approach to delivering projects that prioritised "responding to change over following a plan".

Over the next decade these principles became codified into semi-standard working practices that embody the ideas of agile in practical management tools. So, for examp,e the idea of 'responding to change' is embedded in agile teams through a pattern of working in sprints - fixed periods of working time at the end of which previous plans become negotiable. What counts at the end of a sprint is that users have been carefully listened to, and that the next phase of work responds primarily to what they need, not to what was in the original plan.

As such, agile teams expect their plans to change considerably as a project evolves. Teams using waterfall, on the other hand, expect the plans to change as little as possible. When applied to development processes designed to give the public services and experiences, the quality difference between the two approach is enormous, with the teams that constantly learn and revise generally offering much better services than those that stick to the original plan.

Exercise 2: Building a COVID warning and notification app for Germany - 35'

In this exercise students are again broken into teams of 4-5 people. This time they are assigned the question of how they would go about designing and delivering a COVID-19 alerting and warning app for people in Germany, on behalf of the Federal government. Give the students 15 minutes to do this.

Before the exercise starts, remind students about what they have just heard about up-front planning versus learning during development. Ask them to discuss how they would work out what to do, and how they might document their planning process.

Once the 15 minutes is over, ask the first team to present their approach. Ask other groups to challenge the first group about how they would respond to inexpected developments.