Metodologias ágeis para a gestão de projetos de P&D: estudo piloto em uma indústria

Abstract

Agile Project Management is a set of principles, frameworks, and practices that aims to generate more value for the companies and their customers in an innovative and mutable environment. These methodologies, originating from the software industry, can also be implemented in R&D projects of other types of industries. This work had the goal to carry out a pilot implementation of some agile methodologies on the South America R&D Center of RHI Magnesita, the global leader of the refractory sector. It drove 7 R&D projects involving 30 workers from several departments, including researchers, PMO, technical marketing, and product management. This work was divided into 4 main phases. The first one consisted of a diagnosis to understand the current system of R&D projects management and its problems. The second phase was the selection of tools to be implemented deriving out of the bottlenecks identified. The third phase focused on the implementation of the tools and good practices, and the fourth one was set out to evaluate the results of the pilot implementation. In the course of these 4 phases, more than 11 interviews were conducted, 40 questions were sent in surveys, and about 150 meetings took place. Coming out of the diagnosis, 3 main agile principles were defined to be encouraged: communication between the stakeholders of the projects, iterative process, and self-management. In order to bring these principles into the pilot projects, 4 tools and good practices were implemented: Project Model Canvas, Kanban board, follow-up meetings, and meetings with all stakeholders. These 4 methods were implemented in the 7 pilot projects. According to the researchers, the main benefits observed using the methodologies were: transparency in the tasks to be done; discussion about all aspects of the project, as risk, benefits, and deliverables; validation of the need and relevance of that project to the company; focus in the customers and their needs; fail-fast concept; alignment and communication between the stakeholders related to the tasks and next steps; organization in the tasks and phases of the project; the speed of the development of the project and changes and adaptations in the next steps of the project according to the previous results. This work will be the basis for the scale-up of these agile methodologies to all the R&D projects of the company and it also can be used as a guide for other industries that decide to implement agile in their projects.