Code is a developer's signature on a software project, and not all developers play by the rules of good coding standards. Ensure that your development team leaves a coding legacy that not only implements the application at hand but can be understood by others and maintained during future development cycles.
As a manger or coach, if you don’t change a pacesetter’s behavior you run a high risk of being held hostage by one person’s abilities--and pay a cost in team productivity. This article is about a pacesetter as a team member on an agile software development team. We will explain what a pacesetter is, why it’s a problem and the effect that a pacesetter has on agile software development.
While the developers are developing, you should be managing! Here’s how.
Imagine if you could get the stages and steps of a Distributed Application Development methodology distilled into a ready-to-use Microsoft Project plan. You can! Download it now.
The webWAVE Development project plan in Microsoft Project offers your intranet development team a blueprint for establishing a corporate communications vehicle that can streamline business processes, allow increased access to corporate information and revolutionize knowledge sharing--while reducing overall communications costs.
Improved deliverable! Who am I? Where do I fit in the scheme of things? These soul-searching philosophical questions can be answered by reading Schopenhauer or by looking at your enterprise's organization chart. Here's a typical project team structure chart for an interactive web development project, along with glossary pages of who does what.
What creative and technical skills are essential to have on your intranet development team? This matrix lays them out in quantitative and qualitative terms and lets you assess how a candidate stacks up.
Some love 'em. Some loathe 'em. But these frameworks and schools of PM thought are here to stay. What benefits and challenges do they present? Read on for both sides of the alternative equation...
How do you lead and develop resources across the miles? Having a strengthened project team can be hard enough if everyone is located in the same location, but how do you ensure success when the project is global in scope? In this article, we explore different aspects of team and individual development and leadership--and some of the specific challenges that are introduced in a global project.
Ever stop to ponder all the different PM frameworks that have been developed over the years and which one you should be using in your organization? Is there really one best framework out there? The options are dizzying, so here we take a look at four of them in depth. What can they do for you? Remember, one size does not fit all...
To achieve a Zen culture of Scrum will take time, resources and a radical paradigm shift. Is it worth it? Yes, because this practice places humans--not processes or techniques--at the center of an organization. Let's learn more about a valuable history.
The system is ready for testing, and you'd better check to see if everything is there. Formalize the hand-off process between the development team and the testing team with this checklist and signoff form.
On a mission to debunk more agile myths, this writer arrived at the Eternal Triangle...where issues surrounding people, processes and tools awaited to challenge his thinking. Do you agree or disagree? And what are your assumptions about self-organizing and cross-functional teams?
Despite this global recession, the competitive landscape keeps becoming more urgent and faster paced. You will be expected to keep managing new projects to keep your organization competitive--but will do so with less (and exhausted) resources, tight budgets and more scrutiny for success. How does one meet such challenges and succeed? One of the agile practices tailor made for such an environment is the Lean method.
Stolen from Real Life (a data warehouse development project for a waste water treatment management system), this Microsoft Project plan takes you through the construction of a complete data warehouse from start to finish.
If you and your team have a bunch of application development tools to evaluate, use this form to make the job easier.
Use this Common Component Change Request Form to track all component change requests.
This is the grandmother of all balanced scorecard templates! Here are 18 (count 'em, 18!) Excel templates that will help you develop a balanced score card from start to finish.
Whether you're a part of the gantthead Leadership Interest Group or not, this self-assessment will help you evaluate your skills--and find areas for improvement.
Take the temperature of your project every week with this checklist. Make adjustments to your plan or procedures if necessary to correct any deficiencies and keep the project on target and on time.
Sometimes a pure agile approach is not appropriate for a particular project — the important thing is getting the work done, not strict adherence to a process. Still, a non-agile project can benefit from the inherent values of agile, including strong team collaboration, prioritized, incremental development, and regular progress assessment and adaptation.
PM principles state that there should be absolute clarity in obtaining the requirements. If the fog of ambiguity clouds this phase, the delivered project will never be accepted by the stakeholders. Here we examine some of the glaring issues in the requirements management process.
Function points are a measure of the size of a software system. To convert function points into levels of effort, the productivity of the enterprise's development teams must be known or estimated. This three-for-one zipped deliverable includes a document explaining function point analysis, instructions on how to apply a function point analysis and a worksheet set up for an Albrecht function point analysis.
Agile needs to change the rules of deployment; otherwise, it’s losing effectiveness. If you are going to commit to agile development, then commit to more frequent deployments and everybody wins. Let’s take a look at changing the product deployment model with agile.
Do you make trade-offs with maintainability and adaptability in order to meet release dates? Fortunately, this hidden-cost fate is avoidable--but only for organizations that make a commitment. This article introduces you to technical debt and its common symptoms. You'll learn the basic steps to set up a repayment plan, the common causes of technical debt and effective strategies for paying it down.
A new agile procurement process--one that can operate in conjunction with and alongside an agile software development methodology--should significantly improve both the procurement of software vendor’s services and and successful delivery of software projects. This article will explore the underlying principles as well as map the reconciliation points required to harmonize agile development and procurement methods.
This comprehensive project plan proposes a Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach to implementing a complete customer business service system (processing of customer contacts, accounts, billing, etc.). It reports the findings of a six-week planning/investigative phase and forecasts the analysis, design, construction and testing phases of the project.
This super-comprehensive project plan in Microsoft Word is chock full of information on how to plan and manage a data warehouse project. It covers the gamut in DW project planning and control activities and will teach you a lot about data warehouse architectures, tools, risk management, development activities, quality management and the like. Enjoy the read!
As products become increasingly complex, design teams must integrate a wide range of expertise throughout the development process. This offers new opportunities for innovation while helping to carry the vision all the way through to production and curtailing late compromises.
Improved deliverable! Use this training plan to prepare your project team to hit the ground running and get the just-in-time skills, business policy and application training they need to do the job.
The average project manager has a challenge, and a large one at that. Most of us don’t have a career development plan. In fact, most of us didn’t necessarily pick this as a career--it picked us. But now that we’re here, the challenge is to figure out exactly where we go with it. To understand how our careers progress, it helps to have a model with which we can associate. Find out what important trio awaits inside...
You're leading the team to deliver...what more do they want?! This article highlights a few, simple best practices that--if introduced at the beginning of your project--might help you easily control costs along the way.
Use this checklist to evaluate your organization's mechanisms for identifying problems in the software development process, correcting development process deficiencies and preventing the recurrence of project problems brought on by development process deficiencies.
When you are equipping your project team with laptops, you can use this plan to make sure you don't miss any crucial steps in image development, logistics and deployment.
Does your project team and your client know what the project milestones should look like? Describe the progressive milestones and their relationship to the rest of the project, as in this example of the design phase of an application development project.
CollabNet updates its TeamForge platform and ScrumWorks project management application, focusing on scaling agile to the enterprise through flexible reporting, ease of use and other enhancements.
On new development projects, the production stage can be the point of no return. Before it’s too late, a rigorous gating process can help to ensure that development activities, teamwide input and critical stakeholder priorities are all aligned with the overall project vision.
Some substantive updates to the definition of Scrum artifacts may seem like minor clarifications to terms and definitions, but they have quite profound implications. In this article, we discuss these changes and how they affect the ScrumMaster (or project manager) tasked with delivering a “done” increment.
This procedure defines all the activities involved in software development, from design through unit testing.
It's important to clarify the purpose and status reporting expectations early in the project. Here, we share a sample integration management cadence for a large project or program that effectively balances the time with the administrative overhead.
Use this Excel spreadsheet to plan and keep track of your project's human resources (i.e., your project and development teams) across the life of a project. Compare resource-level estimates that you make throughout the project to better understand where you were "off" and how to make better predictions going forward.
There is lots of great information available on how to use agile methods for custom software development projects, but less so for package implementations. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf solutions make up a large percentage of the IT projects undertaken by companies each year, and many organizations are missing out on benefits that an agile package approach can bring.
This procedure defines the activities involved in the lifecycle of software product development .
We know, we know...it's a jungle out there in software land. These stories should introduce you to the unfortunate trials and tribulations of software development management--and the ways to overcome or avert them And all of these apply to project management, too! (You won't get too depressed, we promise!)
As a manger or coach, if you don’t change a pacesetter’s behavior you run a high risk of being held hostage by one person’s abilities--and pay a cost in team productivity. This article is about a pacesetter as a team member on an agile software development team. In this installment, we discuss useful approaches to dealing with these sometimes problematic people.
Are you lucky enough to keep team members for the entire project? If not, utilizing standards in coding, such as these, will help speed up the integration of new team members along the course of the project.
There are two key parts to employee evaluations: How they're doing, and where they're going. This template will help you with both the "now" of the performance appraisal and the "future" of that employees career path and development.
The first step in scaling agile is to move from partial methods to a full-fledged, disciplined delivery process. The second step is to understand eight scaling factors and determine which are applicable to the range of complexities your project teams face. Here, agile thought leader Scott Ambler presents his scaling model.
Adult children. Jumbo shrimp. Seriously funny. I’m sure you recognize these expressions as oxymorons — self-contradictory phrases, often with an ironic meaning. Should we add “agile requirements” to the list? Does agile development fit in with traditional requirements practices? And if so, how?
How can you adapt Scrum-like tools and techniques within a Waterfall project management environment? What can you do to reduce resistance and reap the benefits Scrum has to offer? In short, how can you get down and Scrummy within a Waterfall world? Here are some ideas you might find useful.
