I’ve been working with organizations who want to move their programs to agile. They’ve been successful with small projects. But now, they want to make agile work with large programs, programs that involve hardware or firmware, programs with many pieces of interdependent software features, programs of 50 to 300 (or more!) people. Now, you might […]
Agile approaches work for projects. Have you considered how to make agile work for a program? A program is composed of several projects, typically across the organization. Each of the sub-projects delivers value. But the real value to the organization is when all of the projects deliver results in a synchronized fashion. Since agile approaches
Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams? That’s because you were working
Chris asked in his comment, how about using the word ‘abandoned’ for projects that are “finished”? I just don’t think of completed projects as abandoned. Let’s separate the product from the project. Projects complete. Products may never be done, but projects do finish, sometimes whether we want them to or not. I was working as
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Pragmatic Manager, Vol. 5 #3, Timeboxes Help Multisite Teams April 29, 2008 Feature Article: Timeboxes Help Multisite Teams I love timeboxing my work. Timeboxing–choosing a period of time in which to finish a specific task–helps me stay focused on just one thing at a time. Imagine you’ve estimated you have
When I teach project management, I ask the participants to create a project charter (See my templates page for one I use to start). I recently encountered a battered project manager who does not have a project charter for a project with 6 or 7 sub-projects. This PM is smart, but has never managed a
Months ago, Debbie asked this question, “Do you have any comparative analysis on the disciplines (project management and program management) that you would like to share?” To me, program management is the ability to take a project or a series of projects and manage those (see Program Management: Multiple Projects With Multiple Deliverables) in the
Caveat: I just started thinking about this, so I don’t feel particularly articulate. After reading Roy’s post of Kent Beck’s discussion “Invest in the design of the system every day”, I realized that’s what I do for project planning. Every day, I’ll adapt the work I’ve planned to do, to meet the needs of
In my project management class today, one of the students asked about how to schedule interdependent sub-projects. The scheduling tool he uses doesn’t deal well with pieces of one sub-project having dependencies of other sub-projects. It’s difficult to see the critical path, and to know what’s really going on. (It’s too easy to have
Program management is the art of managing an effort of multiple projects with multiple deliverables. If you google “Program Management,” you’ll see a bunch of interesting posts, including Chris Pratley’s Program Management. To me, Chris is describing project management, albeit of a large project. When Chris talks about his “program” management, he’s discussing the coordination