Project management process reflected through assistive tools
Elina Kurkimäki · Theseus (Ammattikorkeakoulujen) · 2011
This thesis presents a project management process of a target company with outlines the correct usage of the company’s project tracking tool, Atlassian Jira. The target company uses Scrum, an agile project management framework, for its projects and combines it with some practices from Kanban. The process is documented in a business process approach using workflow charts to visualize the processes. The documented process is established as a part of the organization’s quality management system that is created based on the ISO 9001 quality management system requirements. The implementation of the process description was done alongside with an empirical validation of the model in a software project. The documented project management process description includes four phases within a Scrum project: planning a project, planning a Sprint, executing a Sprint and ending a Sprint. All of the phases are described in a check list form that lines out what is to be done before that phase, who is responsible for the phase, what the procedure is and who should be present in the meeting or meetings in that phase and what should be the outcome of the meeting in question. Planning a project consists of an effort estimation and a project phasing with guides to the project and Backlog creation to Jira. Planning a Sprint describes the two Sprint planning meetings to be held before starting a Sprint and setting up the tasks in Jira as a Sprint Backlog. Carrying out a Sprint describes the daily duties the Scrum-Team has: updating the Kanban task board and having Daily Scrum meetings. Ending a Sprint contains two Scrum meetings, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective. The process description ends with a list of Scrum artifacts that can be used as a reference when reading the documentation. The process description in this thesis does not create a new way for project management in the target company but documents the way activities are managed for the quality management system documentation. In the process of documentation, some additions were made for unifying the project management practices within the organization.