ALTERthought Blogs Archives: Budgeting
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16 June 2009
Velocity is not enough, expand the Agile dashboard …
So, one of the most powerful tools in the Agile Project Management Manifesto is the concept of velocity (and burn charts). Fundamentally, what you’re measuring is what your team is accomplishing over what it planned to accomplish. While this is a terrifically succinct and clarifying — and indeed the bottom line — with regard to […]
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9 February 2009
Earning up: Agile ‘burn ups’ in an economic turndown
So, the point of this post is not to explain the concept of an agile burn-up and its use in tracking project progress. Alistair Cockburn does a great job of that. Kudos to him for also explaining how Agile burn tracking was, in effect, born from Earned Value Analysis. Conventional wisdom tends to idealize that […]
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12 October 2008
The Switching Gears Factor
This summer we gave a presentation on simplifying the software estimation process for modern distributed systems. In it, we tried to boil down 10 years of thinking and experience on the subject; our goal was to make the process much more repeatable than it has historically been and as simple as is appropriate. On this […]
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21 June 2008
Estimating Like Pro
In this presentation, we’ve tried to provide some glue and distill some powerful concepts which can allow teams to rapidly enter negotiation with business customers regarding functionality, schedule, and cost. This seminar is focused on helping analysts, architects, and project managers become more confident using rapid and accurate estimation and planning skills. It serves to bridge the gap between Lean/Agile approaches and the more intensive forecasting needs of organizations of various sizes.
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1 August 2007
Grails Vs. Rails - the Thrilla in Manila: A Study on Platform Productivity
“Down goes Frazier (Ruby on Rails), down goes Frazier …” If the numbers we are tracking regarding an ongoing Enterprise Groovy/Grails initiative continue to pan out; as a business person, I will have a clear statement in the Rails/Grails debate: “I want all Grails, and I want it all the time.”
Our client is a Fortune […]
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27 June 2007
Ruby on Rails as a Platform of Choice? The Case for Rails.
I’ll preface this post, by stating there are people infinitely more qualified in our company to discuss the technical merits of Ruby on Rails (RoR) as a framework choice. I write this post from the various perspectives of the “president,” “idea guy,” the sometimes “project manager,” and the “unresponsive stakeholder.”
There is much hullabaloo about RoR […]
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7 June 2007
Revenue on Ruby on Rails …
Okay, so its not the most poetic title, but that’s what you get when Captain Alliteration gets your login and password. For the last 18 months we at ALTERthought have been diving into the deep end of the Ruby on Rails (RoR) pool. The technologies are clearly compelling for a number of reasons that are […]
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5 June 2007
5 Ingredients for the Application Development ROI Soup
Fact: The way most of us in the industry calculate Return on Investment (ROI) for software application development is broken.
As we continue to work with our partners, competitors, and clients, I am continually stunned by how companies quantify the business value gained from application development and integration work they perform. Typically, its an after-the-fact analysis […]
