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Johanna’s Books
Category Archives: schedule
When You Don’t Need a Schedule
I’m particular about two things: calling a prose plan a project plan and calling a Gantt chart (or yellow stickies) a schedule. One of my colleagues emailed me last week, explaining he’d spent a week developing a project plan and … Continue reading
Posted in rollingwave, schedule
Tagged Manage It, project management, release criteria, timebox
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“Roll With It” Posted
The Projects@Work folks have posted another excerpt from Manage It! See Roll With It to read a bit about rolling wave scheduling.
Scheduling the Project is a Team Activity
Glen Alleman in What’s Wrong With This Picture says this: dentifying, sequencing, and assigning durations to tasks is NOT the role of the Project Scheduler, it is the role of the project team, along with the Project Scheduler. The … Continue reading
Probabilistic Scheduling
I’m writing my project management book. I have no idea how far along I am. (Wait, I promise to explain.) When I write, I have several phases: the exploratory phase, where I write articles, the write-it-down phase, where I … Continue reading
Plan to Refactor
One of the scheduling tips I discuss in my project management workshops is “Plan to refactor.” I explain that if you’re using a lifecycle other than Agile, where the integration and testing is built into every iteration, you’re going … Continue reading
“Complete” and “Freeze” Aren’t
I had a discussion recently with a manager who was concerned about his developers meeting their milestones. “We have “Code Complete” as a milestone. The developers say they meet it, but that just means they wrote code until the … Continue reading
How Much Planning is Enough?
I gave a talk entitled “Predicting Project Completion” at the Central Mass chapter of the PMI last night. I had some suggestions about techniques to generate and discuss schedule estimates. Then, to practice a little, I asked the audience … Continue reading
You Can Always Change Course
If you’re managing a project longer than a few weeks, you may realize that the project’s progress is not quite where you think it should be. It can seem impossible to change course. But choosing to continue what you’re … Continue reading
Impossible Schedules Reinforce No Thinking
I’ve been thinking a lot about impossible schedules. I’m talking about the project schedules that no matter how you organize the project, it’s not possible for this group of people to cram that set of features into this much … Continue reading
Invest in the Design of Your Project Every Day
Caveat: I just started thinking about this, so I don’t feel particularly articulate. After reading Roy’s post of Kent Beck’s discussion “Invest in the design of the system every day”, I realized that’s what I do for project planning. … Continue reading
Posted in schedule
Tagged product development, program management, project management
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