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 to have to refactor at the end, when you do integrate and test. At one […]
I’m in Israel now (for workshops). I was traveling through Newark yesterday, and had to change terminals between the domestic flight that got me to Newark and the international flight that was going to leave from Newark. Turns out, a bunch of other people had to change terminals too. The signs are so bad,
When I teach project management, I teach people to know what success means, and to know what done means (release criteria). One of my students recently emailed me: At work recently, we’ve come upon a scenario where we have no success criteria (or more accurately, success criteria that we can measure in any way).
I’m working with a group of people who are new to iterative development. They’re doing more of a staged delivery lifecycle than an agile lifecycle, but they are releasing about once a month. They don’t like it, because they say they’re releasing too frequently. The problem is that their planning and releasing take too
I have an opportunity to review process documentation (actual and proposed) from many organizations. I admit, I have a prejudice for more Agile techniques (integrated into any lifecycle). But non-Agile techniques work too. Here’s what I find doesn’t work: making the process dependent on the personalities of the people who have to carry out
I teach a class called “Software Methodology” at The Gordon Institute. My goal is for the students to be able to recognize if a software project is not being managed properly, and to give them a feel for what a software project might be like. So, I have them organize themselves into teams and
The Orasi folks have posted my fall webinars, both the audio and PDF presentation. If you missed What Makes a Great Product Manager? Managing the Project Portfolio Delivering the Right Product on Time: Setting Expectations between Engineering and the Three PMs check out the webinars.
In the immortal words of Dilbert/Scott Adams, “Agile programming doesn’t just mean doing more work with fewer people.” See today’s cartoon.
One of my students emailed me recently, asking about how to assess project complexity. He said, “I think it would be pretty neat and also quite useful if you could define a project as say a .60 Apollos or what have you… I don’t imagine it would be at all easy to come up
In my project management class a few weeks ago, I did an activity on feedback. In my experience, many project managers are also functional managers, so they need to give feedback. And, in highly collaborative teams, the person called “manager” isn’t the only one to give and receive feedback. One team got stuck. One