For all the discussion about process improvement, company culture, and team member morale, you might recall that Sunrise Labs is a medical product development firm. Sunrise Labs was founded to be different, and that’s evident in everything they do down to the way they run their daily operations. Today on Making Bright Ideas Work, the Sunrise Podcast powered by Sunrise Labs, we sat down with Program Manager, Joe McCluskey to discuss how agile project management is more than methodology — it’s about people.
“Personal ownership means that you really take pride and you want to deliver the best you can,” McCluskey said. “Individual contributions help the team, like the building blocks, to create a better widget when you combine all those personal ownership items.”
While the team at Sunrise uses agile methodology, most commonly used in software development, and a daily scrum in its everyday operations, they take a very personal approach to project management. Scrum is a methodology that allows a team to self-organize with daily information exchanges and make changes quickly, in accordance with agile principles.
“Anybody can make a document and check a list, but the dynamics of a project excel when there’s personal ownership and human stimulation,” McCluskey said. “There’s also humanization of the project itself. If it’s a pilot build, personalize the name of the pilot or deliverable. Call it a name. Everybody can connect to a name.”