SMART-UP

Our project brings together a team of like-minded people focused on improving the success of projects and operational processes by increasing management effectiveness.

Our work is grounded in theoretical and applied research into the management of organisational-technical (socio-technical) systems, and in the open sharing of knowledge and technology.

SMART-UP is a set of approaches and tools for effective project and operations management without the need for heroics—designed for situations where doing things the “right” or “best” way isn’t possible, yet the work still has to be done.

In other words, SMART-UP is a methodology that bundles rules and tools for effective project management for enterprise customers operating under high uncertainty. It is founded on principles proven in the management of scientific research and in commanding troops in combat.

One of the key success factors in warfare—as in research—is the proactive construction of an information model of the subject under study: a map of the forthcoming operations. Decisions are then made based on the continuous monitoring of changes on that map, and—crucially—on the ongoing assessment of the consequences of those decisions across the whole system.
The core idea of SMART-UP is that, to build such a model on a software project, you need to register in JIRA not only the work tasks tackled by the project team, but also the full set of requirements the team is working to satisfy. Every piece of work on the project must be explicitly linked to the requirement(s) it serves. The model also tracks the resources expected to deliver results—time, budget, and staff skills.
SMART-UP provides tools to visualise and analyse the current state of projects and operational activity—in other words, to present the current operational picture, the project’s “battlespace” map. As a result, you can objectively assess, in real time, how management decisions affect outcomes.

The JIRA setup described here was initially aimed at easing the headaches of a project team running a software project. As we iterated on these tools to solve practical project-management problems, it became clear that the resulting information model gives a robust end-to-end view of software delivery processes. We also realised the same approaches can be applied to other production processes, and that our tools can be used with other project and manufacturing management systems as well.
This, in turn, creates the conditions for boosting the effectiveness of project teams through BPM mechanisms. We believe SMART-UP is fully capable of supporting the step-by-step maturation of the software development process without dedicated BPMS. All further suggestions on using SMART-UP to automate the management of projects and operations are made with this in mind.
In addition, the materials on this site serve as an informal team playbook for software projects delivered to large enterprise clients. The main theme of our project is the evolutionary improvement of software-project quality through better management effectiveness—in other words, practical ways to progress through the levels of the CMMI model.