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Posts tagged "Metrics" (Page 3)
Estimating the project is one of the greatest challenges, with or without fancy project management tools, that a manager will face. Here are three areas where we've seen estimates fail and how we've avoided doing the same.
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September 7, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
That’s the ticket. Let’s get a great project management tool that will help us get everything done faster. We’ll complete all our projects quicker and finally deliver more of them on time! Not so fast young Jedi apprentice ....
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August 17, 2010 Bruce Benson
Change Management
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Objective project management tools are something we all look for. However, too often the move to become fully objective results in a loss of insights while we are trying to figure out how to become analytical. Here are a few "gut" insights that have helped us avoid this problem.
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June 22, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
Project risk management is not about not having problems. Risk management is about being able to handle the problems that come up. With good risk management the problems that occur have a very low probability of ultimately impacting the project. Here are two approaches that have worked for us.
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April 20, 2010 Bruce Benson
Risk Management
Does your project management tool tell you how much effort your team is expending on your critical project? A simple calculation showed me that I was managing a house of cards that could come tumbling down unless I took action immediately.
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March 29, 2010 Bruce Benson
Reporting
I talked excitedly about taking a small team of developers and reducing an eight-year backlog of change requests to nothing after two years of incremental development. My colleagues at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) were unimpressed. "But Bruce, your experience may not be the definitive one!" This wonderful statement was used to dismiss everything I knew in just the few seconds it took to say it.
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March 22, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
The bottom line is that you can know if your project management tool estimating is accurate. More to the point, estimating in a project can be verifiably accurate.
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December 21, 2009 Bruce Benson
Schedule
The key step? We have to change something that will actually help us. Here, “test every line of code” made a huge difference in this software organization. This is the first of several articles on basic changes that made a huge difference and why they worked.
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October 8, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
Improving quality can have a surprisingly stressful impact on your project testing organization. A good set of quality metrics can help keep your improvements on track as your organizations adjusts to the new reality.
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September 29, 2009 Bruce Benson
Testing
Look into using your existing business systems as part of your project management tools. The business systems used by everyone to do their daily jobs can often provide more current and predictive information than relying solely on our traditional project management tools.
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September 2, 2009 Bruce Benson
Communication, Reporting
A simple project management tool, such as computing an average, can transform a project from chaotic and out of control to suddenly predictable and manageable. Here are some simple averages that made a huge difference in our management of large and complex projects.
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June 28, 2009 Bruce Benson
Reporting
This post is adapted from an e-mail I had sent to a CEO who was looking for project management tools to help deliver his products when promised. In the past his organization had successfully been able to know precisely where their product readiness stood. Trending defects will work well in managing projects of all types.
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May 29, 2009 Bruce Benson
Reporting, Schedule
