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 […]
Why Your Project Plan Will Fail
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?
Why Gantt Charts Are Useless For Agile Projects
What can you learn about your agile project from this Gantt 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 […]
Barrier To Agile Development
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 […]
Perpetually Almost Finished Projects
Your project is almost finished. Last week, it was almost finished. And you suspect that next week, it will still be almost finished. Why does this happen, and what can you do about it? In some ways, we’ve known about this problem for almost 2500 years But the solutions are […]
Prioritization and Value Maximization
We all know the story about the emperor’s new clothes. I’ve been thinking about prioritization and scheduling, and as far as I know, no one is promoting that we maximize value – they (and we) have been promoting that we do the most valuable stuff first. Doing the most valuable […]
Juggling The Elements of An Iteration
You expect analysis to happen before design, and both to happen before implementation and testing. But how much should these activities be staggered? When a project is being run with monthly releases, it might seem logical to have each group working on a different release. For example, the test team […]
Benefits of Agile Story Decomposition
When you plan a release, agile user stories, or classic use cases are the best sized pieces to use in the planning – from the perspective of your customers. Each user story can be further decomposed into a set of specifications, and those into development tasks. Development tasks are the […]
Failure To Deliver Is Not An Option
But sometimes, it happens anyway. The Cranky PM started a great thread of conversation asking how product managers deal with the job of telling customers (and sales folks) that a feature is not going to be available in the promised release.