Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition for Agile Project Management

1. Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition for Agile Project Management PhD Milorad Tosic, MSc Valentina Milicevic, PhD Miomir Stankovic

2. Agile project management system • Agile project management may deliver benefits, such as: • reduce project risks; • reduce overhead costs; • improve project success rate.  • We envision the agile project management system as: • the intelligent information system, • collecting information • processing and presenting information in a structured way • cooperate with users and other systems in • problem solving; • discovery, access and manipulation of a wide variety of multimedia data and knowledge. EUROCON 2005

3. Collaborative information systems • Components of the supporting IT infrastructure for adoption of agile methodologies in the project management in general • roles • processes • mechanisms • Collaborative mechanisms • Result: Support IT infrastructure for knowledge acquisition and interaction flows in the agile project management over Collaborative Semantic Web Portal Prototype EUROCON 2005

4. Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition • Role: • Domain Practitioner (DP) • agent that works on practical problems from a certain domain on a daily basis, but has a single, narrow view to the problem. DP possesses tacit knowledge, the knowledge that it is not aware of but is indispensable for the everyday practice. • Role: • Methodology Execution Manager (MEM) • agent that, according to the existing methodology, interacts with other agents following the roles on the project and helps them perceive overall progress and value add on the project. • Processes • Concretization of Agents • Information, data, and knowledge acquisition at the macro level • Integration and revision of collected DOVs • Information, data and knowledge mining and analyzing, generation of reports, and final study report development • Domain Ontology & Vocabulary (DOV) • For the purpose of the project management, we organize data, information and knowledge in a form of DOV. DOV encapsulates terminology, knowledge, vocabularies, etc. that are used at the boundary of some domain. The DOV may be further specialized as organizational, micro, methodological and expert. • Role: • Domain Expert (DE) • agent that is not necessarily directly involved in daily practice in the domain, but has expert domain knowledge. Such person is called “external expert” or “consultant”. • Role: • Data Collector (DC) • agent that executes the process of data collection EUROCON 2005

5. Collaborative Mechanisms • Work Group (WG) • System Administrator • administers the group and provides IT resources for the group. • Content Administrator • administers the content that is accumulated within the group boundaries. • Workgroup Administrator • is a member of the WG with privileges to organize activities within the group. • Workgroup Member • is any user participating in the WG. • Indicators • Activity Indicators • number of active users, number of passive users, periodical review of the group’s activity, level of interaction intensity, etc. The indicators may be assigned to a user, group or to any other system’s element. • Social Indicators • for example, number of users interested in sharing the same system element; • LD ("likes-dislikes") Indicator • an actor in the system may like/dislike some other system’s element (other user or group, resource, time of the day, etc.). • Forms • Forms are collaboratively developed, usually within a WG. These forms are then used to structure communication with actors outside the WG (questionnaires, surveys, reports, etc.). Also, the forms are used for knowledge and information acquisition. • Reports • Automatic generation of diverse reports over the content developed in a collaborative, multi-user fashion. The forms may be used as report’s templates. • E-mail notification • Automatic notification to subscribed workgroups and workgroup members about specified content changes. Multi view Interface for accessing system resources Multilanguage support Interface for being aware of other system’s elements EUROCON 2005

6. Our answer: Collaborative Semantic Web Portal Prototype • Prototype: • Inter- as well as intra-community collaboration, • Workflow and Process management, • Interaction, • Knowledge sharing and dissemination, • Heterogeneous information integration, • Awearness building. • Mechanisms: • System login and working groups, • Interaction over content, • Interaction over structure, • Interaction over presentation semantics. EUROCON 2005

7. Menu creating and editing • Page attachments as documents and pictures • Page and content creating and editing • Different ways of the content printing EUROCON 2005

8. Interaction over content: Collaborative page editing EUROCON 2005

9. Interaction over content: Content printing • Preaty printing • Pure text printing • PDF printing EUROCON 2005

10. Interaction over structure: Automatic Links • Automatic links for page neighbourhood (links pointing to the page and links pointing from the page) • Usefull for drop-down menus within main menu as well as page-specific manues reflecting current context EUROCON 2005

11. Interaction over presentation semantics • Importing inter and intra web pages or their some part into page content EUROCON 2005

12. Interaction over presentation semantics • Personalization and configuration of several existing applications EUROCON 2005

13. Our experience so far Agile project management • Interactive distributed meeting minutes administration • Project knowledge accumulation • Project members have location-independent access to shared project’s documentation over the Web • Collaborative reports writing; • Adaptable workspace • Automatic e-mail notification about changes in the shared workspace; • Project participant's motivation factor is increased; • Team communication is improved; • Management of the project is more natural; • Continuous monitoring is easier and project information is available to all project members. EUROCON 2005

14. Conclusion • Process for collaborative knowledge acquisition • Roles, processes and collaborative mechanisms • Several projects running under Collaborative Semantic Web Portal Prototype • http://infosys1.elfak.ni.ac.yu/ • http://ntpark.elfak.ni.ac.yu/ • http://infosys1.elfak.ni.ac.yu/nastava EUROCON 2005

15. Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition for Agile Project Management Questions? http://infosys1.elfak.ni.ac.yu