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. […]
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 3 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 3 In the previous two issues, I suggested some approaches for making a waterfall work for you. If you missed either of those issues, see Waterfall Part
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 2 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Making Waterfall (a Serial Lifecycle) Work For You, Part 2 Last month, I suggested some approaches for making a waterfall work for you. If you missed that issue, see <https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/waterfallpart1.html>. Assuming you’re somewhere in the coding
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat, Part 1 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat Some projects zoom along, making progress regularly. Others feel as if they slog along, with barely any progress from week to week, or worse, month to month. Why? The zooming projects have
Pawel caught me being ambiguous. See his comment, “1. I’ve seen features/fixes which required 2 days to be developed and released.” Sorry, me too. But what I tried to say was this: A feature was estimated to be some duration of person-hours. Those person-hours have come and gone. The feature still requires another 10-12
I ran a little workshop today about transitioning to agile. I was talking about timeboxed iterations, and one of the participants asked this question. “So I don’t quite finish one of the features I want to finish in this iteration–and it’s the end of the project. I think it’s going to take me a
Thierry poses a question I’ve heard in several of my PM workshops this week and last week: When should the team do the architectural work? Thierry’s concerned if his team continues to implement by feature, how can the team do the architectural work? If they take an iteration or two to deal with architecture,
Several years ago, a colleague emailed me, asking how to keep sponsors involved. My colleague was using company-mandated phase-gate lifecycle with long project durations (18-24 months). I’d recommended providing a project dashboard and showing the sponsor progress. My colleague was stumped–the dashboard wasn’t particularly helpful until they were in the testing phase and it
When I teach project management, I ask the participants to create a project charter (See my templates page for one I use to start). I recently encountered a battered project manager who does not have a project charter for a project with 6 or 7 sub-projects. This PM is smart, but has never managed a
Via Pragmatic Marketing, this piece on How to use timeboxes for scheduling software delivery.