Workshop Objective: You’ve started the transition to Scrum or some other agile lifecycle for your projects. You can see that it’s working well for the teams. And, now you realize you still have problems. You still have emergency projects. Or, you have emergency fixes. Or, you have specialists that have to be on more than one […]
Workshop Objective: If you’re dreading the next project—because you know it will be a disaster, or at the very least uncomfortable—it’s time to think about designing your next project. We’re accustomed to thinking about designing products or tests, but projects? Is it really possible to design a project? Yes. Lifecycles, those idealized approaches to organizing
Workshop Objective: How do you separate the talkers from the doers? How do you know this person will fit with your team? This workshop teaches you what you need to know to conduct an effective interview. You won’t have to ask questions that people can recite canned answers to, such as, “Tell me your weaknesses.” You
Workshop Objective: Hiring the right people at the right time in a high technology company remains a challenge even to experienced managers. This workshop prepares technical managers (or the HR folks who work with technical managers) for the preparation and hiring of people into the organization. Workshop Overview: This workshop walks you through a pragmatic approach to
Workshop Objective: This experiential workshop helps agile technical teams prepare, interview, and select candidates. This workshop prepares people who may have only been on one side of the interview as a candidate to effectively participate on an interviewing team and effectively evaluate candidates. This workshop specifically address the cultural issues and particulars of finding candidates who
Workshop Objective: This experiential workshop provides you with an understanding and options for how you might create a successful geographically distributed agile project. The topics we’ll address are how to plan and execute the work for a geographically distributed project. Workshop Overview: If you have teams all over the world trying to create a product together, you
So where does all of this get us with budgets and dates? In many ways, estimating project budgets or dates for agile projects turns out to be irrelevant. If you have a ranked backlog, and you finish features, you can always stop the project if you hit a particular date or cost. It does matter
In Part 3, you had some knowledge of the team’s velocity. This is the option of when you do not have knowledge of the team’s velocity, because this team has not worked together before, or has not worked on a project like this before. You are all coming in blind. Your Zeroth Best Bet: Wait
You have options for estimation, once you have met the preconditions. If you don’t have the feature set in a ranked order, you are in trouble. That’s because if you use any lifecycle other than an agile lifecycle, the feature order matters to your estimates, and the team will discuss the feature order in addition
So now that you know why it’s so difficult to estimate what do you do when someone asks you for an estimate? Preconditions for Estimation First, you ask a question back: “What’s most important to you? If it’s 3 weeks before the end of the project, and we haven’t finished all the features and we