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POD in Project
Introduction
POD in Project stands for “product-oriented delivery.” This refers to an interdisciplinary team of business and technology professionals working as a single unit to handle all features of development and maintenance.
In a POD team, the isolation between group members is broken, and the team works with a “we build it, we own it” mentality. As a result, there are no time-consuming handovers between individual sections, allowing organizations to be more agile than ever.
The team members of a POD will together have the services to design, develop, test, and operate a product, ensuring self-sufficiency.
Uses of POD in Project
- Many large companies are beginning to use a pod method approach when it comes to projects. The pod method divides your teams into groups, or pods, or eight people or fewer. Each team then names itself and creates a hit list.
- Each team has individual roles assigned to individuals and someone to manage the team. The person considered the manager makes the project plan for the team.
- It should be noted that the roles within each group are not linked to the position of a person within the company. The pod method removes the hierarchy and focuses on teamwork and getting the job done, allowing each team autonomy.
- It also shows the entire team that the company trusts them to work independently and deliver a successful project. At the end of each Project, each group can vote on their wins and losses to improve for the following Project.
POD in Project Planning
An Agile POD team requires people who manage a variety of IT roles. For example, a POD consists of SCRUM Masters, Product Leads, Technical/Business Analysts, UX Designers, UI Developers, Full Stack Developers, DevOps Engineers, Test Engineers, QA Engineers, Cloud Engineers, etc.
Although specialists with different skills coexist in a POD team, it does not mean they all have the same hierarchy. Instead, members are group by their functionality into team members, which consists of:
A Core Team – These members are fully committed to working for your POD. They are there at all meetings and conferences.
Part-Time Specialists – These team members are present as part-time resources to assist different PODs with their specialized project needs. They could be working for multiple PODs at the same time. Examples include a user interface designer or a white box tester.
A POD leader: A POD leader orders work with the business management team, explains requirements, and regularly replenishes the backlog for upcoming projects.
To get the most out of an Agile POD team, it is essential to define precise requirements.
Benefits of the POD in Project
The POD in Project has three key benefits: scalability, collaboration, and efficiency. Let’s examine each one in more detail.
1. Scalability
By combining all the necessary disciplines into one unit, the POD model eliminates the traditional roadblocks in the software development process related to transfers and lag time between phases that occur when skills segment the team. POD teams can join and leave projects as needed to provide the right resources for each sprint.
2. Collaboration
Because POD teams are small, fostering productive relationships among team members is easier as communication becomes more streamlined.
Additionally, by working closely with others in related disciplines, employees develop an awareness of the broader process for producing the deliverable and the unique needs of each field to attain the objective. This improves teamwork with other team members and allows employees to consider meeting these requirements.
3. Efficiency
With all the necessary skill sets under one roof, POD teams are highly productive because reviewing and testing deliverables is streamlined. In addition, by working thoroughly with all investors, team members have easy right to feedback on their offerings. This reduces the risk of bugs making it to production and allows team members to course-correct earlier in the process.
The Drawbacks of the POD in Project
While the POD model offers many advantages, it is not ideal in all scenarios. Here are some cons to consider before making the transition.
1. Distributed decision making
An advantage of the POD model is that those doing the work can make strategic decisions, such as choosing the technology stack to produce a feature.
However, inexperienced team members may lack the leadership skills and experience to make these decisions. This means you must ensure that each POD team has experienced professionals to determine the team’s strategy. It would help if you also promoted mentoring to foster these instincts in newer team members so they can participate in future discussions.
2. High level of coordination
The vision of the POD model is that each team is autonomous so that multiple tasks can be carried out in parallel. This needs careful planning to define the goals of each sprint and ensure that they are entirely self-contained.
In other words, a task should not require resources from another POD machine.
Implementation of a POD in Project
If you’ve identified the POD model for your organization, here are the steps to start setting up your POD equipment.
Plan the model.
As mentioned above, careful planning is a must for any POD model. Start by inspecting the Project and classifying its underlying objectives: what does the customer want, and what will it take to meet their needs? You can then break these individual points down into separate areas of responsibility and distill them into tasks.
Once you have the work breakdown, you can determine how to divide these responsibilities among the PODs to ensure that each sprint ends with a functional result. In addition, you now have the information to decide the number of POD teams and the skills needed within each group to meet these requirements.
Finally, you can form your POD teams and assign individual responsibilities. Ensuring that each section has the necessary leadership and technical expertise to meet the project requirements is essential. Now that you’ve defined your sprint goals and selected your teams, it’s time to launch.
Execute your strategy.
This phase is all about flexibility. As your teams come together and start getting work done, actively collect feedback so you can classify areas of friction and work with internal leaders to address them. These stakeholders should also look for potential conflicts and intervene as necessary, especially if it involves a new project or team.
During each sprint and after its conclusion, you should also track metrics to measure progress against goals.
Performance measure.
Applying a new POD model is a success on its own. But how do you know it valued the effort?
You can track team activity and results across key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine your POD implementation’s effectiveness, including product quality, sprint completion rate, and customer satisfaction ratings. You should also collect anecdotal feedback from team members to determine their consensus on the model and whether they have identified areas for improvement after working “in the trenches.”
Best practices determined from these quantitative and qualitative measurements should be shared across POD teams so everyone can use these steps to develop their execution during the next sprint.
Create centers of excellence for your DevOps lifecycle.
The POD model focuses on forming autonomous teams to meet the individual wants of software projects and is an addition to the principles of agile and DevOps methodologies. It offers advantages in scale, collaboration, and speed of execution and capable leaders within individual teams.
Implementing a POD model is a development of the DevOps model combining development and operations in small, independent teams.
Conclusion
Hence, POD in the Project is a software development strategy that creates small cross-functional teams with specific project tasks. Different companies have adopted the Agile POD method due to its dynamic logic of combining business teams with IT. Companies in different industries need fast solutions to bring quality products to market and stay ahead of the competition. The achievements with the POD teams are visualizes easily and become more agile than implementing a SCRUM work scheme.