Projects are a necessary evil 🙂 But necessary they are. Some people really feel the need to understand precisely what the project will cost and exactly long it will take. If this is the basis for investment, of course that’s a completely understandable feeling. For years, traditional waterfall projects have been sold on the false pretense that projects are predictable.
On BAU (Business As Usual) development, an agile approach makes a lot of sense. Moving through iterations, working on features from the Product Backlog, collaborating with stakeholders about the requirements for each feature, delivering working software incrementally. But what about Projects? (that’s Projects with a capital P). In an agile environment, do we still need Projects? Or is everything literally
Rapid Project Inception view presentation (tags: agile thoughtworks) Ideally, agile principles should be applied long before a project reaches development. I’ve written recently about how PowerPoint can be used as an effective lightweight alternative to a traditional PID (Project Initiation Document). I’ve also posted a sample template for an Agile Project Initiation Presentation (PIP). In these slides, the first handful
I’ve written before about how I think Agile Project Management alone is not enough. Project Initiation is one of the areas of agile methods that I think needs embelishment for large projects. Over the years, I’ve used quite a few techniques for project initiation. But I’ve never really come across an agile one. My first experience of formal project initiation
Check out the above video. It’s an interview with Mike Cohn (about 10 minutes long). In this interview, Mike talks about scaling agile across the enterprise, on projects as large as 700 people! Mike is the author of the popular books, Agile Estimating & Planning and User Stories Applied. Personally I particularly like the User Stories Applied book. I’ve written
For agile project management, agile methodologies such as Scrum and eXtreme Programming alone are not enough. eXtreme Programming (XP) is excellent for agile engineering practices that improve product quality, and User Stories from XP are an excellent way to simplify the understanding and management of requirements on a piecemeal basis. Scrum is excellent for managing a project team’s workload and
With an agile development approach, there is no big spec and no big design up-front. Scope is variable. Requirements emerge and evolve. Features can be added, changed and removed throughout the project lifecycle. So, with this moving target, how do you keep sight of the bigger picture? Although agile development is all about breaking things down – breaking things down
ExtremePlanner has announced the publication of a new agile project management book, written by their founder David Churchville. The book is called “Agile Thinking: Leading Successful Software Projects and Teams”. It’s essentially a compilation of over 40 blog posts from his blog, Agile Project Planning, although apparently it’s been edited to make better reading in book form. And that got
In a few entries on my blog, I have referred to Velocity and only briefly explained what it is. I think it’s about time I explain properly for those not familiar with it. Velocity is terminology from the Scrum agile methodology and is basically the same concept as Earned Value in more traditional project management methods. This is how it
Discussing software development metrics at my place of work, a colleague (Derek Morrison) came up with a neat concept – a way of measuring Business Value. We’re using Scrum as an agile management framework, estimating in points and measuring Velocity to help plan future Sprints. For those not familiar with Velocity, it’s the total estimated cost (in effort or points)
By Kelly Waters
“’Agile’ is one of the biggest buzzwords of the last decade. Agile methods often come across as rather more complicated than they really are. This book is an attempt to unravel that complexity. To simplify the concepts. This book breaks the concepts into small bite-sized pieces that are easy to understand and easy to implement and delivers the message in a friendly and conversational style. Allaboutagile.com is one of the most popular blogs about agile on the web. ”
Kelly Waters
Emma Hopkinson-Spark
“Whilst there are lots of ways you can vary the game depending on the teams you have and the learning outcomes you want, the basic flow of the game play is common to all.”
Emma Hopkinson-Spark
101 Ways Limited
145 City Rd
London
EC1V 1AZ
United Kingdom
101 Ways BV
Weesperstraat 61-105
1018 VN Amsterdam
Netherlands
If you would like to get in touch with one of the team at 101 Ways, then please fill out the form below or email us at contact-us@101ways.com.