Summary: While managing a long project, it’s easy to lose track of progress. And, when that happens, how do you even know whether you’re still making progress? In this article, Johanna Rothman offers suggestions to help you take your project one step at a time and keep it under control. When I coach managers or […]
A Small New Year’s Tip: Timebox, Not Scopebox I hope you are all enjoying your holidays. Many people use this time of year to reflect and then make New Year’s resolutions. I’m not one of them. Sure, I reflect, but I rarely make any New Year’s resolutions. I’ve never kept a resolution for more than
“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
Dave and Bob have great comments on my post, Might Three Backlogs Be Better Than One?. Dave is describing situations where management is making reasonable decisions, not incurring management debt, and by extension, technical debt. Bob and I have experience with significant management debt. (Take a look at Musings About Management Debt for more information
Jurgen asked me to help publicize his survey. Ok, I’ve done it. Now, let me rant about explain why I think surveys like this are not useful, and may be harmful. A survey does not take your context into account. Surveys about any practices without considering the industry, the products, and the management don’t tell
I was thinking about the automakers, and how they want many billions of $ from Washington (please, noooo). I don’t know what their strategic planning is, but it seems not to have changed from the 1960’s. Certainly, when I started buying cars in the 1970’s, I could not afford the low quality/high price/low gas mileage.
I was speaking with a potential client about their approach to knowledge management. They think they need a senior person to organize a top-down appoach, and build a custom tool, so they know what knowledge they want to manage and have a place to put it. I don’t think that’s going to work. That approach
I received two questions this week about how well does agile allow you to do traceability matrix. Very well is the short answer. Here’s why. If you commit to implementing features (not chunks of architecture) based on user stories in an iteration, you know what you’re planning before the iteration starts. Because you’re working in
One of the problems I see in projects is that there is not a sufficient definition of done. For agile teams, it’s not clear what done means for a timebox. For non-agile projects, the team may not agree on what done means for a milestone or for a release. For an agile team, do you
I publish a monthly email newsletter, the Pragmatic Manager. Last month’s topic was Timeboxes Help Multisite Teams. Let me know if you like the formatting of the page the same way I format the email newsletter, or if I should not be so fancy-dancy.