Imagine this scenario: you want to transition to agile, and you have a geographically dispersed team with people all over the world. You have two developers in the UK and two in Boston, two testers in Portland, Oregon, a product manager in Brazil, and you, the project manager are in Sweden. And, you are pretty […]
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
I gave a talk last night at the Software Quality Group of New England about schedule games. During the talk, I explained how serial lifecycles don’t manage technical, schedule, or cost risk. Serial lifecycles actually increase the duration of the project. And, serial lifecycles don’t offer feedback early enough for the project team. (They only
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
Earlier this week, I was at SPC teaching about project requirements and project management. If you haven’t thought about lifecycles, consider the differences between these kinds of lifecycles: Linear: Waterfall and waterfall with feedback Iterative: Spiral, where the whole product is up for grabs each time Incremental: Where you add to the product in pieces