I originally wanted to write about how to start an agile project, possibly the pilot agile project in your organization—if it was starved of resources, people, machines, space, whatever. But I can’t write that article because no advice is worth the space. You shouldn’t even start that project. An important tenet of agile project management […]
I finally heard about the almost-complete financial numbers from the Agile 2009 conference. The conference is supposed to generate enough monies for the Agile Alliance to fund research, other conferences, guest speakers, and a whole bunch of other initiatives that are on the site. I was happy, because early indications are that we did. No,
“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
Linda manages a large program LargeEngCo calls “Sales Order Support,” SOS. The SOS program contains four projects. The goal is to provide to the salespeople in the field the list of what products this customer had previously ordered, and what was now available as add-ons for those products. Linda has asked Paul, her CIO, when
I’ve been working and speaking with whole bunch of people who want to “go agile.” They are not set up for agile. They have gates for approval. They don’t have teams that projects flow through; they assign people to whatever project whenever. (growl. People are not fungible. growl) They have geographically distributed team bits (I
I’m yak shaving this week. When I returned from the Agile conference, my right ear didn’t clear. It’s all clogged now, and the left one isn’t totally clear either. I have vertigo. I’m moving slowly and look drunk when I walk. In the meantime, I have articles to write, proposals to finish, work to do.
I love it when my readers challenge what I’m saying, as in Plunge In or Dip Your Toe? (for Projects). I do believe in small steps for projects. I’ve long been an advocate of inch-pebbles, of standup meetings, of iterations and incremental development. I love knowing what done means, for the project and for features
I’ve been teaching a variety of workshops recently, some of which are Scrum. One of the questions people have is: Can we do this partway? No, not Scrum or any other agile lifecycle. You either do it all or you’re not doing agile. You can work in timeboxed iterations. But if you haven’t gotten to
I’m now the proud and happy owner of a new reservoir for our tankless hot water heater. (Tankless is a relative term, when it comes to hot water heaters.) A week ago, the reservoir part of our system finally broke. We had a new reservoir installed on Wednesday, and our lives have changed for the
Remember Why Projects Don’t Need Specialists? Well, I decided I had a little more to say. I decided to write an article, What’s So Special About Specialists? Please do comment there or here.