Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Did you see Dwayne Phillips’ post today, Adding People to a Late Project? Dwayne says: Adding people to a late project only makes it later. We have known this for decades. Especially in the article he refers to, it seems as if there might be no end to the number of people added. Did anyone …
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 …
Continue reading “Estimating the Unknown: Dates or Budgets, Part 5”
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 …
Continue reading “Estimating the Unknown: Dates or Budgets, Part 4”
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 …
Continue reading “Estimating the Unknown: Projects or Budgets, Part 3”
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 …
Continue reading “Estimating the Unknown: Projects or Budgets, Part 2”
Almost every manager I know wants to know when a project will be done. Some managers decree when a project will be done. Some managers think they can decree both the date and the feature set. There is one other tiny small subset, those managers who ask, “When can you finish this set of ranked …
Continue reading “Estimating the Unknown: Dates or Budgets, Part 1”
I’m in Las Vegas waiting to get on a plan to Los Angeles to go to New Zealand for SDC. I led a workshop yesterday for real estate project managers about how to define success and manage some of the early-in-the-project risks. We discussed issues such as the Hudson Bay start, context-free questions, release criteria, …
Continue reading “Similarities and Differences in Project Management”
I’m sure you’ve read of the AIG scandal by now. (Here is the Fox News story and here is the CNN story.) Shame is too small a word for those executives. I would love to know where their entitlement comes from. I’d squish it like a bug. Maybe they went to the resort to do …
Continue reading “Resorts Aren't Necessary for Strategic Planning”
I spoke recently with a (new) Scrum Master with a team who’s new to Scrum. One of the team members is a little stuck. He doesn’t feel comfortable going to the task board to take a task when he’s done. He wants to wait until someone else is ready and then work with that person. …
Continue reading “Moving Team Members from Being Controlled to Taking Initiative”
One of the big problems in organizations (IT or product-shipping) is how to fund projects. I don’t believe in ROI (Return on Investment). I learned how to lie with ROI back in 1988–I can make the numbers be anything you want. If you don’t have ROI, how do you know what projects to fund? One …