Archive of Project Management Articles

Creating a PERT estimate for a single task is both easy and straightforward. Creating an estimate for a set of tasks is still easy, but requires a little bit of math. Combining PERT estimates for tasks is easy, but not as obvious. Roll up your sleeves and dive in.

There’s really only one way to travel down a waterfall – in a barrel.  A lot of people died this way, but some survived.  Software projects have been predominantly waterfall projects since the start of software projects.  And stakeholders rode down those projects, basically in a barrel.  The people riding Niagara Falls 100 years ago didn’t know if they would survive until they got to the end.  Stakeholders in waterfall projects don’t know if they will succeed until the end.

An agile project is dependent upon tight interaction (and feedback) with stakeholders.

If you’re running an agile project, and your stakeholders are old-school barrel-riders, how do you make it work?

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An effective status report is one that

• Instantly conveys the state of the project.
• Creates a minimum of overhead for the project team.
• Gets you help when you need it, and latitude when you don’t.
• Is fun / energizing to the author and the readers.

An effective status report is not a myth, it is actually easy to achieve.

Is your product successful because you were lucky, or because you were methodical and intentional?

Do you want to build a plan where you are dependent on good fortune, or do you want to make your own “luck?” Both approaches work, but only one makes sense as an intention. Slide 3 of your presentation to a venture capitalist should not say “And then we get lucky!”

We’re dedicating our “blogging time” this week to doing some infrastructure upgrades – we have to address some security issues on the site. Until we get through these changes, we’ll be recycling some of our existing content. For our recent readers, it will be “new to you” and for our long time readers, we appreciate your patience. Today we look at one of our most popular articles – on using Timeboxes to manage your project plan.

Bill Miller, who writes You Want it When?, a blog focused on improving the way you manage software development and I had a debate over email about outsourcing. We looked at pro’s and con’s, and our discussion centered around the best outsourcing model, and what the ramifications of outsourcing really are. Read on to see the back-and-forth.

We create cost estimates at many times in a project. From budgetary estimates at the start of a project all the way to PERT estimates of tasks in a work breakdown structure. Creating a budgetary estimate seems impossible – you have to make many assumptions, your estimates are based on the unknown – they can’t be good. There are ways to make budgetary estimates easier to generate and refine – but they can create a sense of false precision.

You’ve written a project plan. Your team is ready to start. Here’s the bad news – you’re going to fail. But why? How can you avoid failure?

What can you learn about your agile project from this Gannt chart? The one above looks out two years. It shows task dependencies and concurrencies. If you’re iteratively developing software, do you really expect to know what you’ll be doing two years from now, to know if you truly have a dependency? You may understand the dependencies with a two-month time horizon. But how much effort are you investing in creating a detailed, two-month Gannt chart? And how much value are you getting from it?

Why don’t more companies and teams use agile development techniques? We know some teams just aren’t aware of them – although that list is getting shorter every year. The benefits of iterative development over waterfall development are pretty well established. I don’t believe I’ve seen a study that shows that waterfall is more effective. Do people refuse to believe in the data? Or maybe they are unable to believe.