How To Quickly Give Your Boss An Accurate Estimate
The problem is not a surprise request for a quick estimate. The problem is that we are not prepared to give quick estimates. Here is how we did it.
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Home » Posts tagged "Requirements" (Page 2)
Why Project Managers Should Not Set Up Metrics To Measure Improvement Efforts
Establish up front how we are going to know if the agile adoption was successful? If we have to do that, we may have other problems to deal with first.
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Key Metrics Often Tell Us More Than Classic Project Management Tools
Some key project metrics not only provide tactical insight into how a project is going, they can also provide an overall strategic view not found elsewhere. Here are three we've used successfully.
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Finding A Noble Purpose For That Project Motivates Success
The commercial world is all about making money. Yet successful companies often have a noble mission beyond just making money that helps drive their success.
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A Real Project Management Plan May Confuse Many People
We took the official plan document and turned it into a real plan that we used everyday. This was different from the classic plan that was created to meet a checklist requirement. Here is how we made the change and how moving to a real plan can often confuse folks and how we overcame this normal confusion.
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Why Waterfall Project Management Threatens To Return
Especially for complex and costly IT projects, customers need to invest more in the up-front evaluation. Oh, no. Here we go again.
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Five Reasons Managing Projects Objectively Is Hard And How To Succeed Anyway
I'm a great advocate of managing using objective, data driven, project management tools. I often call it being "brutally honest" but with the insight it is only "brutal" to organizations that have locked themselves into other than objective approaches. Here are five reasons why being objective is hard, and ways we successfully overcame these barriers.
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Is Your Project Schedule Really Driven By Your Requirements?
Sometimes it is the team process and not the project requirements that determines a project's schedule.
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Project Management Metrics Madness? Don’t Do It!
It happened pretty regularly. To make some functionally work on the project we needed something else that we overlooked. No problem. We make the change -- tag it as a missed requirement in our project management tool -- and approve it. A couple of weeks later the additional functionality is completed and gets submitted to be put into the product. It is submitted as a “new requirement.” It shows up as scope creep. I called up the project manager and explain they tagged it incorrectly. Please change it to a missed requirement. “Oh no!”, she practically yells, “It is a new requirement!
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Project Managers Repeat After Me: Software Development Is A Repeatable Process
I had a job interview for VP of Development. The interviewing VP with a long history in the industry asked me a simple question: Did I think software development was a repeatable process? I said yes. I won't describe the ensuing discussion except to say I didn't get the job. We didn't even get to talk about project management tools!
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