Faith in the Process
Generally in software development, process has been described as the steps we take to get things done, and is often captured as a specified approach to building our products that involves some sort of lifecycle, a collection of roles and responsibilities, a series of artifacts we produce along the way, perhaps some milestones, and some checks and balances to keep the whole thing going smoothly. There is more than meets the eye if we want our approach to be successful. Read more
Pet Tricks
Have you ever run into a situation where all else seems to fail, so you resort to measures that you hope will work, but really don’t know if they will make a difference? Of course you have. If you have ever worked on Windows before, you probably know the most common pet trick of all: ctrl-alt-del. Read more
Off the Beaten Path
Any project manager that has managed (or worked on) even a single project knows that every project will veer off of the planned route in some way. For many projects, this initial deviation is the start of a cascading effect of chaos and reactive decisions that results in delays, dropped scope or reduced quality. Rather than fight it, we should be preparing ourselves to deal with the inevitable unplanned events as best as possible. Read more
Administrative Reporting
I’m just finishing my first round facilitating an intensive project management program with a local university. If there is one thing to distill out as a common challenge among the teams is that there isn’t nearly enough depth of reflection as we move through the project phases. There is a lot of administrative reporting. Read more
Refine the Messaging Platform
There are a lot of things that I like about the agile movement, many of the things I have been doing myself or recommending to clients for years. Short iterations, plenty of interaction, early value and strong leverage of change. A critical new improvement is that it is now OK to talk about how you are going to approach a problem, to talk about process without thinking that the whole thing is a waste of time and money: a nasty stigma has been removed. One thing that is still holding us back, though, is the argument by many agilistas that you have to jump on the bandwagon or you won’t be successful. Read more
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