Summary: While managing a long project, it’s easy to lose track of progress. And, when that happens, how do you even know whether you’re still making progress? In this article, Johanna Rothman offers suggestions to help you take your project one step at a time and keep it under control. When I coach managers or […]
“Hey, Dan, it’s time for us to move to agile,” explained Tristan, a project manager. “Tristan, you’ve been singing that tune for a while,” replied Dan, a member of the PMO. “Well, now I have data that I think you can use with the rest of the PMO and with our senior managers. Look at
I taught my estimation workshop twice last week and once the week before, and one thing remains true: Estimation depends on the project lifecycle, how the project is organized, the state of the requirements, and the number of people you have available. I used a number of simulations to help people see how to estimate,
by, JB Rainsberger and Johanna Rothman, © 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse
I’ve been teaching a project management workshop, and one of the participants said something brilliant: “If you estimate in days, you’ll be off by days. If you estimate in weeks, you’ll be off by weeks.” If you estimate in months, you will be off by months. Here’s why. The more you can break a big
Imagine you’re a project manager. You talk to your technical lead and ask how far along the team is. “Oh, we’re about 90 percent done,” he says. If you’re like most project managers, your heart sinks. You’ve been here before. Ninety percent done means the other 90 percent is left to do. But what can
I plan on about 6 hours of work in a regular day. That’s project work, not answering the phone, email, making arrangements for workshops or consulting or speaking, or invoicing, or any of the other things I do. Nope, that’s just project work. The other half of that question is how many regular days
Pawel caught me being ambiguous. See his comment, “1. I’ve seen features/fixes which required 2 days to be developed and released.” Sorry, me too. But what I tried to say was this: A feature was estimated to be some duration of person-hours. Those person-hours have come and gone. The feature still requires another 10-12
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 write the whole thing down (in chunks, of course), and the editing phase. I’m in the
I’m writing the project management book. I’m noting that sometimes PMs (and teams) perform activities that have no lasting useful effect on the project. One example is doing estimation with feedback. If you estimate but never check reality against those estimates, that’s an example of “mental masturbation: it feels good but there’s no lasting