We had a great interview with James Taylor a couple weeks ago, where we talked about his new book, Smart (Enough) Systems, co-authored with Neil Raden. James is an expert on decision management systems. I spent the late 1990s working on “rules-centric” software systems that allowed us to isolate rules […]
Agile / Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Software development
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Enabling and Resisting Change
Change is a reality of our businesses and our customer’s businesses. Without change, there would be no need to purchase new software. Yet many teams seem to both resist and embrace change at the same time. They embrace change because change leads to demand for new software products. And they […]
Agile / Product Management / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Use Cases
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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 […]
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Software requirements specification
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Broken Requirements Ecosystem
There’s an interesting thread on Seilevel’s requirements forum about why developers don’t read the specs and how to fix this problem. Sometimes the developers throw away the requirements. And that’s bad. But it is a symptom. Something is broken at a higher level.
Communication / Consulting / Product Management / Project Management
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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.
Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / Slightly off-topic
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Gadgets And Goals
What makes the best gadgets great? An understanding of goals and attention to design details. When we take a step back from writing requirements about software, and think about gadgets and goals – the perspective can help us write better requirements and make better prioritization decisions.
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements
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Change is Bad? Mistakes are Worse
CNET ran an article about a month ago about how Microsoft Live Hotmail – the upgrade/replacement of Hotmail failed to win a lot of converts. Microsoft ultimately had to deliver a “classic” version of the new code base to mimic the behavior of the old software. CNET’s analysis, while accurate, […]
Organizations / Product Management
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Pragmatic Marketing Refines and Expands
A lot has happened over the last two months while we were building out nexus. One very interesting thing is the big changes at Pragmatic Marketing. The “800 lb. gorilla in the product management space” has re-branded some of their online assets and introduced new products and services. For some […]
Agile / Agile Project: Ratings / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / Software development
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Nexus – Third Alpha Release Prioritization
The second release of nexus went live today (build 127). It included the top features from our prioritized list published yesterday. This enabled the next use case from our first prioritized list of use cases – searching the articles. We also took this opportunity to refactor part of the user […]