Your boss wants a commitment. You want to offer a prediction. Agile, you say, only allows you to estimate and predict – not to commit. “Horse-hockey!” your boss exclaims, “I want one throat to choke, and it will be yours if you don’t make a commitment and meet it.” There’s […]
Recycling An Article on Timeboxing Your Project Plan
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 […]
This Week in the Past on Tyner Blain [Jan 5]
A look back at the best from this week in the past. This week we look at timeless mistakes: usability mistakes, agile mistakes, and project management mistakes.
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?
Agile’s Biggest Strength is Agile’s Biggest Weakness
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.