IT-projecten scoren doorgaans niet hoog op de succesladder. Over de vraag welke factoren ‘succes bepalen’ of ‘mislukken veroorzaken’ zijn boeken vol geschreven, zonder dat dit tot een aanwijsbare verbetering van resultaten heeft geleid. Kennelijk bestaat de ’silver bullet’ voor dit vraagstuk niet.
201004 project managementVery once in awhile, a book comes along written by an industry luminary that culminates the author’s “best of” professional life experiences and distills them into organized compartments of advice. Former IBM executive Watts Humphrey’s Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself is just such a book.
Mike Riley
http://www.drdobbs.com/blog/archives/2010/04/reflections_on.html
201004 management project management software process improvement teamAgile software development methodologies such as XP, Scrum, DSDM and Crystal Clear are becoming wildly popular. They map to today’s new technologies, and they allow organizations to react quickly to changing needs. One of the most popular of these is proving to be Scrum. From the rugby term, scrum is a philosophy and development approach that focuses on iteration and close collaboration with the goal of creating increments of ‘shippable’ product every few weeks.
Daptiv Scrum gives agile development teams powerful tools to manage Scrum and gives businesses better visibility into Scrum work. Scrum is a flexible process, so naturally a flexible tool can help you to run the process better. Unlike prescriptive tools that force you into one particular flavor of the Scrum process, Daptiv Scrum lets you choose your flavor and easily configure the solution to work with your process. Daptiv Scrum comes ready with the key roles, applications and artifacts you need to manage Scrum in your organization. Start with the included roles – Product Owner, Scrum Master, Team Member and Executive Stakeholder – or create new custom roles.
http://www.daptiv.com/solutions/daptiv_scrum/index.htm
200906 project management scrumProject-driven organizations typically focus on minimizing cost while maximizing utilization of resources, instead of focusing on speed and realizing the value of incremental delivery capabilities that are prioritized by return on investment (ROI). The faulty thinking is that careful, up-front planning can substantially minimize risk. In fact, delays caused by excessive up-front planning are often the biggest project risk encountered. This article dispels the myth of up-front planning as a panacea and offers an approach to driving the enterprise by prioritized business features that are managed in a visible portfolio. This lean portfolio management hastens the delivery of value to the business’s customers - both internal and external.
Guy Beaver
http://www.stickyminds.com/bettersoftware/magazine.asp?fn=cifea
Too many projects? Want to organize them and evaluate them without getting buried under a mountain of statistics? This book will help you collect all your work, decide which projects you should do first, second—and never. You’ll see how to tie your work to your organization’s mission and show your board, your managers, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. You’ll get a better view of the work you have, and learn how to make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be.
The first four chapters are now available in Beta.
Johanna Rothman
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jrport/manage-your-project-portfolio
200902 project managementIn a previous article, The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer, I discussed the flawed Software Management Formulas (SMFs) that form the basis for many decisions in computing. The SMFs suggest to anyone foolish enough to use them that the cost of software development is primarily dependent upon the per hour cost of programmers. Thus, the SMFs suggest the best way to reduce development costs is to find cheaper programmers.
The ultimate manifestation of the SMFs within industry is the current offshore outsourcing (offshoring) fad. To find the cheapest programmers, one moves operations to the lowest wage countries he can find. The hype on offshoring is so frenzied that experience in offshoring has become a mandatory requirement for nearly any senior level computing management job.
John Miano
200811 governance outsourcing project managementIn software development, like many other areas of life, we need to decide when some item of work is done. The decision of “doneness” has wide impacts as under-done creates creates defects, downstream rework, and lost opportunity costs while over-done wastes time and resource and incurs its own lost opportunities.
To be even more critical, in my review of documents from hundreds of clients I find that work items are often under-done in important areas and over-done in trivial ones. That is, the document cover, table of contents, document purpose statement, and sign-off areas have been vetted to precision. However, the requirement, design, test plan, or code contained within has defects both minor and major.
[…] I have four criteria I use to help me decide if the work artifact is done to a level that is good enough for what the project needs to do.
Earl Beede
http://forums.construx.com/blogs/earl/archive/2008/09/08/defining-quot-done-quot.aspx
200810 development project managementProject Time Management is one of the nine knowledge areas of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). It deals with the definition of activities (what are we going to do), the sequencing of the activities (in what order are we going to do them), and the development and control of the schedule (when are we going to perform those activities).
Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to find out what the main principles of time management are in the case of agile software development. I was able to distinguish 10 principles so far, and I will present them here for your convenience. With each principle I also include a reference to an online article that (as far as I can tell) nicely describes the ideas behind it.
Jurgen Appelo
http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/10-principles-agile-project-ti
200808 agile project management