Lisa Power

Lisa Power has been successfully managing projects since 1996. She started in the financial markets industry overseeing software development projects. She utilized waterfall and iterative software development life cycles. This crossed over into managing software engineering CMMI certification projects, where she assisted the organization to reach level 3 certification. After taking a career-break to live overseas in Singapore, she returned to project management in 2009. Lisa has worked as a Project Manager in a variety of industries including financial, insurance, IT, security, pharmaceutical and automotive. Lisa has been exclusively utilizing agile scrum methodologies for the past 3 years at Toyota. 

Up until 2015, almost all her projects followed the Waterfall software development lifecycle.  Businesses were comfortable granting approval only for projects that had defined scope and budgets, combined with detailed project plans. This was usually achieved by spending a lot of time and effort in the discovery and planning phases.  Talking to multiple stakeholders and documenting endless pages of requirements would normally take months to complete.  Only then could design specifications be created and approved.  It would not be unusual for approved projects to take 6+ months to start development.  Now we see development happening within 2 weeks of receiving approvals.  The Agile approach to projects allows business partners and project team members to accept some upfront uncertainty for a more collaborative approach to creating a valuable product.

The transition has not been without its pain points.  It can be very scary for a technical team to develop code based on a few high level user stories. Documentation is like a security blanket - it may not keep the monsters away, but we just feel better having it in our hands!  Being given the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’ can create paralysis, or even friction within the team. However, we pushed through the fear and grew more confident in our ability to interpret the stories and deliver what the customer envisioned. Equally, the business is happy with the results.  Our transition to Agile has been an adventure!