ALTERthought Blogs Archives: Project Management
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8 August 2009
Talk @ UVa MSMIT
I gave a talk today at my alma mater for the Executive Masters in Management Information Technology Northern Virginia section. Professor Ryan Nelson was kind enough to invite me to present a combination of topics pertaining to both Agile Project Management and Rapid Planning. All-in-all, I had a great time — even if it is [...]
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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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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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19 May 2008
The Triple Constraint
In interviewing potential Project Management candidates for our clients’ initiatives as well as our own, there are a number of key touchstone questions that we use to assess the experience and capability of potential new hires. Generally speaking the one question that can lead to an organic set of follow up questions that provide a [...]
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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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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 [...]
