project management

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Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat, Part 2

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Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat, Part 2 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat, Part 2 Last month, I discussed how you to generate and maintain a project’s heartbeat–a project’s rhythm. If you missed that issue, see https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/heartbeatpart1.html. This month, you might want to consider some […]

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Articles

What Lifecycle? Selecting the Right Model for Your Project

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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

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Articles

What Project Managers Need to Know About Testing

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Imagine this scenario: Your organization has moved to cross-functional, project-based teams, and you, once a developer, are now a project manager. You understand how to make development work, but testing is like a black box. Until now, you thought testing was something that other people—those in the testing group—did. Now you’re responsible for the testers’

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MPD, podcast

New Podcast at Pragmatic Bookshelf

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Daniel Steinberg, my editor for Manage It! interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. The podcast is here. We discussed some of the issues I’ve seen in organizations on projects. Some of the ideas we discussed were: What does the project manager do, even for an agile project? Has anything changed in project management? What

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lifecycle, MPD

Using Multiple Life Cycles in Combination on a Project, Part 3

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I’ve also used Agile life cycles (Scrum with different size timeboxes) in combination on a project. Here, the developers in the corporate location had a series of features that were big. I did suggest they break the features apart into smaller chunks for ease of estimation and implementation, but they didn’t want to 🙂 The

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lifecycle, MPD

Using Multiple Life Cycles in Combination on a Project, Part 2

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I’ve used another variation on multiple life cycles, especially for larger projects where the project staff or project management didn’t want to or know how to use an agile life cycle. This combination life cycle has two incremental pieces. The developers (at the top of the picture) use Staged Delivery. Since this is not an

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lifecycle, MPD

Using Multiple Life Cycles in Combination on a Project, Part 1

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I’m not a purist. I use whatever tools make sense for the context I’m in, and when it comes to organizing projects, I use whatever life cycles–in whatever combination–make sense to me. In response to a mailing list query, here are ways I’ve used life cycles for a few projects. Let’s assume you’re collaborating with

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management, MPD

Personal Integrity

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If you haven’t yet read Esther’s Promises Involve Self, Other, and Context, do so. Here’s a single quote I like: There’s another part of integrity that involves cleaning up your own messes. Cleaning up the messes you create is difficult and necessary.

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lifecycle, MPD

Project Cycles, Business Cycles, Planning Cycles

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I’ve been thinking about how to manage the project portfolio, and I just realized why so many project portfolio efforts fail. There are three kinds of cycles the project portfolio managers need to manage: Project cycles: when the project could release something Planning cycles: how often the management team assesses the project portfolio Business cycles:

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