Analysis of project managment practices in the start-up stage of a company

The start-up phase of an enterprise is a critical stage for the future development, the company is subject to many external forces that can shut-it down or modify it. The start-up phase of an enterprise is a critical stage for the future development, the company is subject to many external forces that can shut-it down or modify it. Nowadays the start-up is an entrepreneurship movement spread all around the world, even though there is friction between project management and start-up, the collective imaginary see the start-up as a fluid organisation , that work in a complete freedom, able to pivot and change Business plan without problem. In part this is true, start-up doesn’t have the traditional restriction and problem of a developed company. The project management science is becoming recognised by all the economical science as fundamental to run a healthy company and project. Many tools developed during the years by the project manager can be used during the implementation of a start-up company considering the start-up as a project. This thesis report the status of project management practise implemented in start-up and the difficulties encountered during the implantation of some of them. The start-up used for this case study is “OverAlp”, a newborn start-up located in Biella, operating in the tourism sector. To manage the project was implemented an agile Kanban board on Atlassian Jira, the agile approach was combined with a versioning model; this mix allow to properly manage the single version without focusing the strategic view of the company and allowing it to pivot between one version and the other. The starting point for the version 0 was based on the Business Model canvas for the Minimum Viable product. At the end of every iteration was made a Gap-analysis to determine the efficacy of the work and the PM implementation, in conjunction with the Gap analysis also the metric about completion of task were extracted and analysed from the Jira software. The result from the data confirm that due to the intensive human capital nature of the start-up, not all the Project management practise were easy to implement and wasn’t adopted by all the team member rapidly. But when implemented the PM method allow all the member to have a clearer vision about their work in progress.