Archive of Project Management Articles

From Bobby Knight, paraphrased by Mark Cuban, via Marcus Ting-A-Kee:

Everyone has got the will to win, it’s only those with the will to prepare, that do win.

Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough - how do we prevent it from happening?

For your weekend reading pleasure, an interview and an article.

Burndown is a technique used in Scrum projects for tracking the progress within or across sprints. It is an exciting way to track how a team is progressing against a deadline - and we can apply it to any form of project-status. In this article, we will apply it to documenting business processes.
Thanks [...]

Stealing a couple cool ideas for managing project priorities with something you can touch.

Incremental delivery planning is not an oxymoron.  You just plan the soon-to-happen tasks in detail, and keep the distant tasks more vague.  Does this make sense?
Rolling-Wave Planning
Johanna Rothman has posted an article that provides a good introduction to rolling-wave planning.  She explains that she manages incremental projects with biweekly deliveries, and manages the project schedule [...]

… Skyline Unharmed
Short-sighted demands on software teams usually don’t kill people. Software development is often described with a construction analogy. The Big Dig construction project was under exactly that kind of pressure. On July 10th, 12 tons of tunnel ceiling collapsed and killed a motorist. On July 20th, Mitt Romney ordered [...]

We manage release schedules with project management. We manage customer expectations with consulting skills. How do we manage customer expectations about release schedules? With Use Cases.
Background
We started a series of posts exploring why we apply use cases as part of product management, identifying 8 goals for which use cases are [...]

While effective meetings may not be the key to success, ineffective meetings are inarguably one of the largest time wasters in corporations. Applying these tips before, during, and after meetings will make us much more effective.

Agile works because it is designed to help teams adapt to changes in direction. Agile is designed to minimize the pain of changing requirements. Agile proponents believe the premise that requirements will change and no amount of upfront planning will impact that. They believe that the requirements simply do not exist until after something has been built. Agile processes save a lot of time by not doing big upfront requirements gathering or design work. They also don’t involve big up-front planning. They do small planning work. And they do it again and again, throughout the project. This works because they minimize wasted planning effort.