project management

Articles

What’s Your Project Vision?

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If you’ve ever planned a project, you know how hard the initial planning can be. There’s a reason we call the start of the project the “fuzzy front end.” Some project managers give up on the planning altogether and dive into details hoping that a plan will evolve. Looking Ahead It’s possible to generate a

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Take a Stand—Yes or No, Not Maybe

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Edna sprinted down the hall to her next meeting. “Edna, wait up,” her boss yelled. “What do you want, Wayne. I’m in a rush to get to this meeting,” she said. “I want you to run another project for me. It’s about …” Edna interrupted, “Wayne. Stop right there. We had this discussion last month

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MPD

Multitasking is Conflict Avoidance

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  There’s a great quote over at The pernicious thinking behind multi-tasking. Note the admission that required multi-tasking is an implicit means to avoid conflicts around setting priorities. I’ve been doing a bunch of multitasking talks this year (and suggesting ways for people to say no), and have written about it in Successful Project Management.

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MPD

Estimating Tasks: How Much Time is in Your Day?

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  I plan on about 6 hours of work in a regular day. That’s project work, not answering the phone, email, making arrangements for workshops or consulting or speaking, or invoicing, or any of the other things I do. Nope, that’s just project work. The other half of that question is how many regular days

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MPD

Can You See Your Project's Dashboard?

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  In the PM (it’s actually called “software methodology, but I assign a project, so students can experiment with methodologies) class I teach at TGI, I ask the students to create (and then use) a project dashboard, so they have a quantitative way to see their progress (or lack thereof). The students presented their dashboards

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MPD, schedule

Scheduling the Project is a Team Activity

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  Glen Alleman in What’s Wrong With This Picture says this: dentifying, sequencing, and assigning durations to tasks is NOT the role of the Project Scheduler, it is the role of the project team, along with the Project Scheduler. The Work Package Manager, the Customer, the entire team that is accountable for delivering the business

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MPD

Automated Testing Helps Scrum Succeed

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  Guy in his We love Scrum at GigaSpaces, says something critical: […]we’ve been working in the past couple of months on upgrading our automated testing framework. I’ve been assigning five of my top engineers and architects on a project with the objective to provide the development team fast feedback and monitors on quality. Now

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MPD, project management

Timeboxes, Iterations, and Orthodoxy

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If you haven’t read Duane Nathaniel’s thoughtful comment on What Happens When You Can’t Finish What You Wanted in an Iteration?, do so now. Duane makes some great points. RUP has iterations; they’re not timeboxed–they’re deliverable-based. (Take a look at the link that Duane points to.) In the RUP, an iteration results in a deliverable.

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