lifecycle

Syllabus

How to Use Lifecycles to Design Your Project Workshop

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

MPD

Agile is Not a Silver Bullet

Agile and lean approaches, with either short timeboxes or explicit limiting work in progress and a focus on transparency works for many organizations. In the past few weeks, I’ve received a number of inquiries from all sizes of organizations asking the same kind of question, “How can we go all agile?” Experiment with an Agile

Articles

Seeing Work in Progress

“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

Articles

What Lifecycle? Selecting the Right Model for Your Project

A cynical senior manager said, “It feels as if I’m stuck between the traditionalists and the agilistas. We can’t use phase-gate anymore, because it’s not ‘agile’ enough. And the last time, when that multisite project tried Scrum, they failed miserably. Isn’t there a right approach to our projects?” A project doesn’t have to use just

management, MPD

Do the Ends Justify the Means?

In Integrity is the Most Important Requirement in a Manager, I talked about integrity as a requirement for a manager. With the current Patriots scandal, I’m wondering what Belichick was thinking. I don’t claim to know everything about football. I enjoy watching the games. I enjoy seeing a team come together, which is what the

MPD, project management

Pragmatic Manager Pages Updated

I just finished updating all my email newsletter (Pragmatic Manager) pages. I hadn’t announced my most recent newsletter, Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 1 (Vol 4, #1). I’ve reorganized the pages, so go here to read all the previous articles.

measurement, MPD

There is No Such Thing as Percent Complete

  Jason Yip’s Hail Mary software development talks about what happens when you defer all the finishing to the end of the project. In the dashboard chapter of the book, I have a sidebar called “How Can We Have No Completed Work?” which talks about exactly the same thing. The more serial your lifecycle, or

newsletter

Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 3

Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 3 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 3 In the previous two issues, I suggested some approaches for making a waterfall work for you. If you missed either of those issues, see  Waterfall Part

newsletter

Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 2

Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 2 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 2 Last month, I suggested some approaches for making a waterfall work for you. If you missed that issue, see <https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/waterfallpart1.html>. Assuming you’re somewhere in the coding

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