Project Management for Startups: Agile Strategies

The nature and scope of challenges faced by startups often exceed the parameters of traditional project management. Early-stage companies I have worked with seem to become mired in the inertia of rigid project management frameworks, while competitors using agile frameworks experience rapid, iterative, and continuous improvement. What accounts for the notable difference? The ability to effectively apply agile project management within the confines of limited resources.

The landscape for startups requires the ability to enhance operational flexibility, speed and adaptability on an ongoing basis. Building innovative products for the first time, market feedback, responsive pivoting, and all with time and financial resource constraints. This is where agile project management as a framework begins to yield a competitive advantage. Although formal PMP certification training equips participants with the knowledge to manage projects using traditional frameworks, startups require innovative, practical agile frameworks that utilize a for guidance and beyond approach.

Agile project management is based on the concept of empiricism and adaptive planning. Work is streamlined and performed in manageable units called sprints. Rather than scope time in advance and for long periods, time is scoped in shorter iterative cycles; each cycle is called a sprint. This approach to project management originated in the software development and engineering fields and is now being applied by successful startups in varying fields.

The key agile values include:

• Working with products over complete documentation.
• Collaboration with the customer over contracts.
• Adaptation to change over planning.
• Intra-team communication over tools and processes

I have seen agility transform the speed of delivery for most startups. One of the e-commerce startups I mentored switched to agile sprints and improved the cycle of production releases from six months to fourteen days.

Your startup is shrouded in a high degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty can be the result of nightly shifts in the state of the economy. Constant modifications in the preferences of the customer. Unexpected competitor actions. Traditional project management is predicated on the belief that everything is known in advance; rarely is this true for startups.

Agility is the management of uncertainty, and it is made a part of the workflow. You plan for what is known and build it expeditiously to obtain feedback and make adjustments. This approach saves you from wasting invaluable time and resources on unnecessary features.

Scrum: The Framework for Product Development

Scrum coordinates work in time-boxed sprints of usually two weeks. Every sprint begins with a planning session where you and the team agree on a specific set of deliverables. To keep the team aligned, you will hold daily standup meetings of a maximum of fifteen minutes. At the end of the sprint, you will hold a sprint review to demonstrate the working features to the stakeholders. In a sprint retrospective, you will foster a culture of continuous improvement by reflecting on what went well and what can be improved.

The Scrum framework covers three fundamental roles:

• The Product Owner, who symbolizes your customers and decides the order of features.
• The Scrum Master, who facilitates the ceremonies and removes roadblocks.
• The Development Team, which builds the product.

In small startups, these roles tend to get merged. The founder might act as the Product Owner, while the senior developer might take on Scrum Master responsibilities. That's completely fine in resource-constrained environments.

Having a grasp of the fundamentals of a project management plan helps you organize and structure effective sprints, even in the absence of formal training.

As an example, we have Kanban.

Kanban is a workflow management tool that uses visual representations of your work. It can be as simple as having a board with three columns: "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done."

Unlike Scrum, Kanban is not time-boxed. Work can flow freely, and you can pull new work as capacity allows.

There are limits to Work In Progress (WIP), and this is to ensure that no one is overworked. If your "In Progress" section limits three items, then no one can start new work until something is done or finishes.

This mix of constraints is meant to direct focus and ensure that work gets completed.

For startups that provide support, engage in content creation, or have operational work in addition to product development, Kanban can be a better system. It allows for the flexibility to accommodate unforeseen workloads as opposed to having a more structured sprint.

Lean Startup Strategy

Lean Startup practices agile and entrepreneurship. The Build-Measure-Learn loop guides everything:

• Build a core feature MVP
• Measure
• Learn
• Iterate

This avoids building elaborate products nobody wants, and assumes real customer behavior is more valuable than opinions and surveys.

Expensive tools and training is challenging to implement, so start with no-cost, basic methodologies, and resources.

Starting Tips

• Develop a product backlog
• Prioritize features by estimating customer value and effort
• Decide on a sprint length (two weeks is a good starting point)
• Conduct daily stand-ups at a consistent time
• Use Trello or Asana to manage tasks for now
• Schedule a retrospective at the end of the sprint

Your first sprint will likely not go as planned, and that's okay. The retrospective is designed to guide the group on what to adjust.

Ensuring the basic principles of project management are in place helps you realize the benefits of project management from day one of your agile practice.

Effective Sprint Planning

Sprint planning prepares your team for success. Start by reviewing backlog items with the team. Discuss needs, measure workloads, and pledge to hit realistic targets.

Specific goals are better. Instead of "work on the checkout", set as your sprint goal "complete payment integration allowing credit card processing." The more detailed, the less confusion and the better the outcome.

Being able to identify types of project risk helps you plan realistic sprints that anticipate challenges without spreading the team too thin.

Daily Standup Optimization

Standups should focus on three main points per person:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What do I plan to do today?
• What are the obstacles on my way?

Keep it to 15 minutes maximum. If discussions run long, schedule separate meetings afterwards. The stand-up is to synchronize the team; it is not for problem-solving every issue.

The Value of Power

Every two of my teams is on retrospectives. We focus on what went well, what didn't, and what we need to do differently. We discuss two actionable steps to take for the next sprint. Regular retros lead to the refining of processes and the compounding improvement of small fixes. The teams that do not engage in retrospectives do not outperform their competitors.

Managing Shifting Priorities

Priorities are shifting in a startup environment all the time. There is new customer feedback, competitor features, and investor feedback loops.

Agile focuses on accommodating changes between sprints, not during. If jam is urgent to the point that it is a sprint killer, take a moment as a team and decide whether it is worth the disruption to work. Most of the time, it is not.

The study of causes of project failure attempts to look for patterns of failed project attempts and ends with the start of poorly measured and coordinated prioritization for teams.

The Reality of Resource Constraints

Every startup has small teams and tight budgets. In these situations lies the start of agility with a focus on the highest return feature.

Apply the 80/20 rule. Identify the 20% of features that will give the customer the most value and develop the ones that fit this category first. Everything else will wait.

To continue improving on project management as your startup outgrows the basic implementations of agile, consider the Techademy PMP Certification course.

Stakeholder Communication

Investors and executives want certainty, especially when it comes to timeframes and outcomes. The iterative nature of agile and the uncertainty that comes with it can cause discomfort to these stakeholders.

Taking this step by step:

• Regularly sharing progress reviews with working features demonstrates your ability to maintain a consistent roadmap vis-à-vis quarterly themes.
• Visible tracking of quarterly themes with consistent updates or deadlines.
• Use tracking velocity to provide deadline forecasts.
• Win and challenge updates.

Your stakeholders will trust your agile approach more with open and honest deadlines as they see consistent progress and hurdles.

Tracking Velocity

Velocity is the metric that records the total amount of effort done by your team in a specific period (sprint). Tracking this over a few periods will give you your baseline. This baseline velocity should be used to calculate how long the remaining tasks in the backlog will take.

Velocity should never be compared between teams as each respective team has a different standard in estimating their scale of workload. Velocity is for internal planning and should not be used for competition in the outside world.

Metrics that centre around the customer

More lines of code and features that describe the general state of software fulfilment are less relevant to the world as a customer. Consider tracking metrics that provide more direct fulfilment to the users.

These metrics prove your agile process delivers real business value in the eyes of the customer, not just work on the books.

KPI in project management select relevant metrics that work towards the goals of a startup.

In the early stages, scaling a startup with a small team is simple enough. As you grow, the ability to coordinate between multiple teams improves.

Begin with:

• The unified definition of completion across teams.
• The establishment of regular inter-team sync meetings for integration.
• Consistency in tools and practices.
• Technical practices that are standards to avoid integration problems.

Scaling with the Scrum of Scrums is where many startups find success. It lets teams scale while keeping the processes lightweight. Each team sends representatives to coordinate weekly.