ALTERthought Blogs Archives: General
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7 July 2009
What can you build in ~40 hours?
My biz partner and I were relaxing over a few beers the other week and discussing recent trends in software development, agile methodology, etc (and our use of these trends over the past 7-10 years). At some point in time, we started talking about how little time 40 hours (i.e., a ‘typical’ work week) really [...]
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7 July 2009
Genius in small things and the pruning of mail …
Admission: I’m over thinking the release of a new Gmail feature, but I’m thinking its genius (little ‘g’). Given our experience with interactive transaction businesses on the Web (gaming, search, on-line advertising, etc.), I can sort of theorize with imaginary whiteboards and obligatory what-ifs, the benefit of said feature. And, I can see the practical [...]
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19 June 2009
Velocity (plus, plus) – Beefing up the Agile dashboard
First of all, how in the world did I temporarily forget how to spell out the ‘+’ symbol? It ‘looked’ correct with two s’s; sad, really. Earlier, I hinted at some other measures to add as _support_ to the Agile toolkit . To be clear, the raw measure that matters the most when it comes [...]
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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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24 March 2009
Hulu for Academic Lectures …
Lifehacker reviews site Academic Earth – a Hulu-like creation for accessing free lectures and content from Universities and Entrepreneurs. Now you can follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs without having to move to Mountain View and audit classes at Stanford.
I’m looking forward to checking out one from Princeton Professor Alan Binder on the origins [...]
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23 March 2009
Speaking @ Tyson’s Corner PMI Luncheon Group
On Tuesday March 24th, Sunjay Pandey will be speaking at the Project Management Institute’s Tyson’s Corner Area Luncheon Group . Sunjay will be reprising a topic entitled The Switching Gears Factor which describes portions of ALTERthought’s IT Governance approaches – particularly estimation and budgeting. In this session, Sunjay will discuss how the multi-tasking arising from [...]
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23 March 2009
Speaking @ PMI – Central Virginia Chapter
On Thursday, March 19th, Sunjay Pandey will be speaking at the Project Management Institute’s Central Virginia Chapter. Sunjay will be presenting a topic entitled The Switching Gears Factor which describes portions of ALTERthought’s IT Governance approaches – particularly estimation and budgeting. Specifically, Sunjay’s presentation discusses how multi-tasking negatively impacts project schedules and budgets and how [...]
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23 March 2009
Speaking @ National Press Club
Sunjay Pandey will be speaking at the National Press Club on March 4 as part of the PMI’s monthly Executive AM Breakfasts. He will be reprising a presentation that has garnered some interest on how to quickly move from requirements to work plans entitled: Conversation to Commitment: Cues, clues, and tools for turning application development [...]
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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 [...]
