A quick confession I ?grew up? in a waterfall world. All of my early projects used a waterfall methodology. Another way to describe this could be a step or stair step approach. We stepped through the phases. When we completed the initiation phase, we moved on to planning, then to design, then to construction. In […]
A discussion on management plans started by my friend on Govloop recently about management plans got me going. My thinking on the topic of documentation in general has matured over the last few years. I don’t think I know everything though, far from it. What Makes Project Documentation Suck? There are several common problems people […]
In contrast to Jim’s guest post the other day, here is a tale about my grass-roots attempts at implementing lean thinking with my teams within the domain of my control. Some interest in surrounding teams has cropped up, but it’s my view that a true lean system/project requires very strong executive management support. If you […]
Guest post by Jim Kinter I’ve been thinking about how to help a colleague get his arms around a Scrum implementation that seems to be out of control and rife with what my friend Ken Schwaber refers to as “ScrumButs”. During our conversation, I cringed several times when reference was made to their “version” of […]
Guest post by Jim Kinter In my previous post I referenced a conversation with a colleague about a Scrum implementation that hasn’t produced the results he expected. His expectations from the outset seem to be primarily focused on productivity, but motivation and drivers for choosing Scrum is for another day. As I was mulling this […]
Feeling like your small projects aren’t giving you the experience you need? ?I know where you’re coming from. It’s how “accidental” project managers like us start out. ?Small businesses, small projects, small teams. I’ve worked in environments like this in the past, and currently?volunteer for several non-profits where this is the case. ?My activities with […]
Last weekend I wanted to read “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt again. It’s been a few years since I had, and it was one of the first books that really helped me to internalize many of the concepts I take for granted today. I was delighted to find it […]
Project management is one of those things that seems very complex when you’re starting out. But after you been doing it for a while, it really turns out to be a good dose of common sense with some science and discipline added in. I think many project managers tend to focus on tools and techniques […]
There is a great new site in town about Agile project management. They are running a series of interview/guest posts on The State of Agile. To my surprise, Peter from AgileScout.com reached out to me and asked me to be one of the interviewees.? It’s pretty amazing to be included in this list of Agile […]
Complexity in project estimation is important, and yet many if not most project managers seem to ignore it from what I’ve seen. I have been thinking and reading up quite a bit on relative methods for eliciting estimates for projects. I’ve enjoyed Planning Poker mostly as a means to get a team working more as […]
Don't keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It takes practice to capture lessons learned and to make use of those lessons as we move forward. What could you do better?