DEV Community: Riter

ChatOps in Project Management

Riter — Fri, 03 May 2019 08:48:53 +0000

Some years ago, Jesse Newland presented “ChatOps at Github” — an open source chat bot Hubot for automating deployment, graphing, monitoring, provisioning, and many other things to enhance the culture of remote work. That was a beginning of ChatOps history, a new way to manage operations through a chat. Today it is not only about DevOps and deployment. Project managers and whoever else working in a software development team can also find use of it, and many of them already do.

What is ChatOps?

ChatOps is a “collaboration model that helps to connect people, process, tools, and automation into a transparent workflow”. Instead of doing some work in a background, you move an execution of all tasks into a general chat room, making them visible to everyone in a team.

While staying in your usual chat app, you type user-friendly commands which a chatbot will match with certain scripts and plugins. Along with chatbots, there’re also server-side apps listening for these commands and doing jobs. After you type a necessary command, certain actions will be executed without your further participation. These can include quite a wide range of tasks such as deploying application, configurations, backups, notifications, logging, running tests, etc. In fact, you’re able to use ChatOps for anything you can think to script.

ChatOps implements a conversation-driven collaboration which is not new indeed. However, ChatOps brings it to a new level, combining the oldest ways of collaboration with the newest technologies. As a result, ChatOps turned into a powerful tool applied in different spheres of business, technology, science, and beyond.

ChatOps for project managers

Project management and software development is not an exception. With ChatOps, you can integrate your chat app with any third-party software such as your project management tool, time tracking system, billing app, different collaboration software, etc. Rather than switching between numerous apps, your teammates will be able to perform all commands directly in their chat rooms, while a corresponding bot will do the rest of the job.

Today, advanced software development teams already use such or similar solutions in practice to drive organizational activity in chat rooms and avoid constant meetings and extra questions which only distract employees from their work. Some of examples could be HipChat, Flowdock, Campfire, and Slack add-ons. Slack provides its own built-in Slackbot, but there are many third-party solutions as well. For example, StackStorm, Deploybot, and Blockspring bots can be integrated with other chat apps like Atlassian’s HipChat or IRC. For instance, chatbots can be used to create new tickets, add milestone, close tasks, commit time spent on them, attach files to tasks and so on.

In fact, chatbots use cases will be limited by your imagination and team needs only. Teams with technical background usually try to automate as many routine tasks as possible with advanced bots. Most repetitive tasks which you do manually can be done by bots. As a result, we can find a lot of open source advanced custom bots, deep integrations with third-party software, attempts to use AI and ML to boost bots capabilities. Non-technical teams usually use existing chatbots which already implement most common tasks.

Why should you use it

ChatOps provides you with an alternative way of collaboration which has obvious advantages:

“Communication by doing”. No more questions like “Will you create a ticket or shall I?” Everybody knows what part of a job is already done and which should be done yet. All actions are performed in common chat rooms so that most questions become irrelevant. A number of meetings can also be reduced due to general awareness and transparency of the workflow.

“Teaching by doing, by making things visible”. ChatOps allows to increase the speed at which new team members learn common practices, tightens the feedback loop, collaboration, and improves knowledge sharing.
Automatization of routine tasks. Tasks that used to be done manually (that is often accompanied by human error) are now automated with chatbots. Also, all commands in chat rooms are visible to everyone, that makes it easier to find and reproduce them by anybody else in the future.
Instant collaboration. We usually don’t like to keep many apps open while working on tasks, while a chat app is open mostly all the time. As a result, when somebody uses chatbots to perform a task, all updates become instantly seen by all teammates. With ChatOps, we bring our tools into conversations and can collaborate in real time. It becomes easier to notice mistakes, suggest help timely, respond to changes and requests, reduce time spent on project management and cooperation. Not to say about benefits for remote working teams.
History and audit. With ChatOps, you get a full history of all commands executed by all teammates even if your project management tool and other used software do not provide a possibility to track the history of changes. Along with higher visibility and transparency, you get an up-to-date state of the project and a clearer understanding of the recent teammates’ activities.
Humanization of work. As a rule, chatbots support user-friendly commands and NLP. Somebody may complain about the need to memorize commands, however, such problem is now a thing of the past. Today, ChatOps provides user-specific commands that feel intuitive, so that people can send commands to chatbots like they would address them to any of their teammate. Also, the ability to convey the same idea in different words, provided by many modern bots, helps to smooth out communication issues and makes chatbots more interactive. As a result, today’s ChatOps allows to get things done with even a more human way of working.
Cheaper and faster. While you’re still using all your favorite tools, you can reduce time spent on context switching since most tasks can be done from a chat room. And that’s not a secret how much time is wasted on managing the workspace and other administrative stuff.

Where to begin?

So ChatOps is a good way to automate tasks, encourage teams to be transparent, learn from each other, work faster and cheaper, keep and manage everything from one place.

According to the last researches, in the nearest years the market of project management software will change a lot, as well as process management in companies. The main trends in project management will be more remote teams, a great impact of artificial intelligence with maximum automation of the workplace and large-scale integration of various fields of activity. The role of chat rooms in the workflow will continue to increase, while the need for a structured way of task planning will remain in force.

Most companies working on project management tools try to consider these changes already now. For example, at Riter, we focus on its extensive integration with third-party services with help of connected plugins. Full-featured GraphQL API and Webhook support allow to implement chatbots of any complexity and automate any specific tasks. Over time, any self-respecting project management tool with provide you with a wide range of plugins, and even more people will be involved in writing custom open source bots.

There are already enough powerful ChatOps tools available for project management and related needs. Moreover, you will definitely need to spend much time to find out what works best for your company. Just try various bots and add-ons in your team chat room to choose favorite ones. Share your experience with colleagues, track updates since many excellent solutions are appearing right now. Or engage your team of software developers to write your own bots for your workflow.

More related information:

More ChatOps examples
More Slack bots
More about ChatOps in project management
Artificial Intelligence in Today’s Project Management
Why It’s Necessary for Today’s Business to Use Chatbots

Originally published at Riter.co.

Project Management Digest, April 2019

Riter — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 08:11:23 +0000

Hi everybody,

This is the fourth release of our monthly project management digest focused primarily on materials and resources for project managers, product owners, and team leads. However, we’re looking to keep it interesting for everybody working in the IT field. The digest includes the most popular content grouped by topics, the most discussed, controversial, and entertainment articles, as well as general resources such as author blogs, educational materials, and active podcasts.

Topical articles of the month

Most popular articles

Product and project management

The Full List of Product Management Conferences in 2019 – this article includes a list of conferences dedicated to product management. Most of them are congregated in the USA and Europe.
Creating Success – A Guide to Product Manager KPIs – everything you should know about KPIs gathered in one place. The article includes a detailed descriptions of business performance, product usage, product development, product quality, cross-functional, and communicating KPIs.
The (Messy) Shift to Starting Together. The transition to more mission driven, autonomous teams is often characterized by an awkward period. Whereas before, teams were used to a prescriptive backlog of “things to do”, now it is very common to feel like you are in limbo.

Agile and Scrum

Sprint Planning - How it works... Why it works – the podcast episode provides a basic foundational explanation of what sprint planning is, why it is so important, how it works, etc.
“Scrum doesn’t have Project Managers, so we ignore them in our organisation”. Scrum doesn’t know a role called “Project Manager”. Many consider this as evidence that the Project Manager role is obsolete.
If a football team fails, we blame the coach: what if a Scrum Team fails? The article is a fictional story of a team in crisis, and how there are parallels between football teams and Scrum Teams.

Career and leadership

Finding Your Niche as a Project Manager – building your brand and your name is a lifelong ongoing process that requires you to constantly reflect on where you are at and where you want to be—and to reposition yourself.
What Do the Great Thinkers Say About Change Management? “There is nothing permanent except change”. The article is giving perspectives of leaders on change management.
Leadership And Company Hierarchy. Is hierarchy an enemy of equality in the workplace? Does it hinder efficient communication? Or does it bring control and a healthy delegation of responsibility?
What’s your type? Developers share their experience and opinion about good and bad project managers. Join a discussion or just find out which type of a project manager most developers are looking for. Which qualities and skills are the most important in their opinion?
8 Ways to Better Lead Remote Teams. The articles explains eight things the best managers do to successfully lead remote teams.

Productivity and strategy

5 Team-Building Activities To Enhance Employee Performance. In searching for effective measures to boost employee and team performance, team-building activities have proven to be divisive.
Organizations that Work on Fewer Projects at a Time Get More Done. According to the author’s opinion, most people seem to understand that multitasking is a myth and does not boost productivity. But let’s extend this thinking a bit.
What does a business need first in order to begin growing? Any business development starts with process organization. Before starting a new business or expanding an existing business, we need to have clearly defined processes and a clear understanding of these processes.

Risk management

Risk Management is How Adults Manage Projects – the article includes a comprehensive list of books, handbooks, and guides about risk, estimating, and performance modeling. Many of these books can be found online for free, all of them are in print.
Motivated Reasoning and Validating Hypotheses. In this article the authors tell about managing the risk in the backlog, looking at the risk of kidding themselves. Specifically, they use cause and effect and hypotheses to identify the assumptions in their plans, but if they don’t do it the right way, they will lie to themselves by validating their assumptions instead of responding to the truth when they see it.

Most discussed or controversial articles

Anti-Agile. 90% of startups fail. Something is deeply wrong with the way startups approach building a product. And the author believes that Agile lies at the heart of this failure rate. Read why Agile does not work and join the discussion to share your opinion.
Enough with the User Stories already! A bit of controversial reasoning about user stories, their variations, how and when we use them in practice, and why we need to start communicating using Domain Entities, not user stories.
The Most Effective PM Behaviors. Regardless of whether you’re doing Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, or something else, the author thinks doing these things can go a long way to making projects successful.
When Kanban is the Better Choice. Scrum is great, but it is not a right choice for every team in every situation. In some situations, other approaches are called for. Usually it will still be some variant of an agile approach. Most commonly that means Kanban.
The two worst mistakes companies make concerning developers. How many of your project managers have any development experience? The author believes that it’s a mistake — to hire someone with project management experience but zero compute science background. Do you agree? Find out what you should understand to cooperate with the development team successfully.

Entertainment content

Project management – what I really do.
Introducing Scrum-Butt: the agile shiteration.
You don’t know me – when you project manager asks how long will it take to implement a feature.
New development methodology – about implementation of new features and testing.
Customer’s expectation vs budget.
There is a great product mgmt lesson in here.
Announcing Online Dating Just for Scrum Masters and Product Owners.

The best resources for project managers

Author blogs

Drunken PM – a fan of Kanban, David Prior tells about Scrum and Agile project management, suggests useful tips with humor sprinkled throughout.
Herding Cats – a regularly updated collection of articles on project and product management, Agile, time estimation, scheduling, and much more related topics. The website includes posts written since 2005 and is still quite active. Glen Alleman provides in-depth looks at not just the “how” of project management, but the “why” as well.
Roman’s Blog – Roman Pichler, a product management expert specialized in digital products, is teaching product managers and product owners to build a successful product management organization. In addition to the blog, the website contains several videos, presentations, and podcasts.
Leading Agile Blog – the blog includes a great number of articles and videos focused on Agile. Whatever your skill level is, it will probably help you to learn something new.

Educational resources

Scrum Training Series – a collection of video tutorials recommended for those who are new to Scrum. Also, some of the series include interactive quizzes.
Agile Velocity Library – founded in 2010 by CEO and Agile Coach, David Hawks, the website includes a lot of Agile articles, videos, case studies, and white papers to feed your brain.
Impact Mapping – the website is focused on a strategic planning technique known as impact mapping. It prevents organizations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better roadmap decisions. The community resources include many articles, videos, and tools which will be useful for product and project managers. The website also contains enough related resources.

Currently active PM podcasts

Agile Podcast Network – a collection of Agile-oriented podcasts such as “Agile Coffee” (59 episodes), “Agile for Humans” (107 episodes), Deliver It (86 episodes), “The Meta-Cast” (142 episodes), and “Reflection as a Service” (38 episodes). Each of them is unique and deserves separate attention, however, they are united by a common idea and topics. One or more new episodes, which last about 10 minutes each, appear every day.
HBR IdeaCast – a weekly podcast featuring the leading thinkers in business and management from Harvard Business Review. It includes more than 600 episodes, each lasts about 20-40 minutes.
Manage This – the podcast by project managers for project managers with about 80 episodes published since 2016 till now. Each episode lasts about 30-40 minutes and is actively discussed.
Soft Skills Podcast will be useful for everybody working in a software development company regardless of your particular role. The podcast includes 154 episodes, 20-40 minutes each, which release regularly and cover a wide range of topics such as meetings, collaboration, hiring, management, leadership, and much more.

Communities of project managers

Product Management – a free to join Linkedin Product Management Group with over one hundred thousand members. The group offers a discussion board and network dedicated to product managers.
Clarit_e – a Twitter author writes about leadership, change management, project management, business process management, strategy, customer management, and much more. A lot of funny cases from real life practice.

Thank you for reading. We would be glad to know which topics and resources are the most interesting for you. Also, feel free to share your favorite articles and other materials for the next digests. Follow us on social media or subscribe to our blog not miss them.

Originally published at Riter Agile Blog.

The previous releases:
Project Management Digest, March 2019
Project Management Digest, February 2019
Project Management Digest, January 2019