“It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.”– Carveth Read. Oftentimes when we have a lot of information to help us make a decision we feel obliged to believe the outcome that information provides. After all, more information must mean a more accurate outcome, right? Put another way, when confronted with what is…
Virtual Tools for Engaging Busy Stakeholders
We all know that face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective way to communicate, but the reality for some teams is the opportunity for this kind of interaction is limited or even non-existent. Personally, I’ve never worked with a Scrum team that was collocated! We’ve already covered best practices for collaborating with a remote…
Measuring Progress: EVM or Velocity?
There are many advocates in the world that state Earned Value Management (EVM) is the absolute way to know whether you are going to have success in a project, IT or otherwise. The Agile community has adopted velocity and its cumulative effect in either release burn-up or burn-down charts as the means of knowing what…
Impressions on Lego Serious Play
Here at Excella, our Agile Coaching Circle meets monthly to give us an opportunity to share techniques and sharpen our skills. In our last meeting, we did a Lego exercise to explore opportunities for the coming year and generate ideas for improving our work in the Agile Service Area. It was my first exposure to…
Three Tangible Advantages of Going Open Source
There are two common benefits cited as reasons to make a project open source: Generosity: Open source projects are a way of “giving back” to the technical community. Crowd-sourcing: Outside contributors can submit features, bug fixes, and bug reports, providing a free labor source. Both of these arguments may be a tough sell for a…
Changing Your Viewpoint of the Project Management ‘Iron’ Triangle (Part 2)
In the last post, we looked at the traditional approach to project management in terms of how scope, budget, and schedule relate. Now we’re going to make a couple of shifts in how we look at the resulting triangle. When looking at this triangle through an Agile lens, we make two fundamental changes. The first…
Changing Your Viewpoint of the Project Management ‘Iron’ Triangle (Part 1)
This will be the first of two posts to help you understand the alignment between Agile approaches and traditional phased-gate approaches when it comes to project management. The Project Management Institute defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. A project is temporary in that it has…
When is a Rough Estimate Enough of an Estimate?
As Program Managers all know, taking time to estimate a program’s schedule and budget is a critical and highly valued part of the planning cycle. But what happens when projects change direction or new priorities pop up? When plans suddenly shift, it’s impossible for Program and Project Managers to avoid feeling that all of that…
Pulling in the Same Direction: Why Development Projects Need BAs
We’ve all been there…. we’ve worked on teams where software developers and project managers work closely with a client on a project, and deliver a product that still doesn’t quite meet the mark. Maybe it was delivered late. Or maybe it met a client’s long list of requirements, but somehow failed to produce what the…
5 Lessons Learned at the Project Summit BA World
Diversified Communications Canada, in partnership with the Baltimore and Washington, DC chapters of the International Institute of Business Analysis held it’s annual Project Summit (PS) Business Analyst (BA) World conference in May at the Hilton Hotel Arlington in Arlington, Virginia. This annual conference is designed to provide business analysts, project managers, business process engineers, and…