Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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Situation: You Need PM Software With an Agile "Focus on Features"
Agile approaches to project management and application development are certainly maturing. It's easy to say you're taking an agile approach, but successful executive requires discipline and consistency. VersionOne's planning and management application for agile software development, V1: Agile Enterprise, was recently awarded the Jolt Productivity Award for Project Management Tools at the 17th Annual Jolt Awards. CEO Robert Holler was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about what makes his product special.
Agile approaches to project management and application development are certainly maturing. It's easy to say you're taking an agile approach, but successful executive requires discipline and consistency. VersionOne's planning and management application for agile software development, V1: Agile Enterprise, was recently awarded the Jolt Productivity Award for Project Management Tools at the 17th Annual Jolt Awards. CEO Robert Holler was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about what makes his product special.Q. What are the specific features of V1: Agile Enterprise that won you the Jolt Award this year?
that won you the Jolt Award this year?
that won you the Jolt Award this year?
A: Generally speaking, key enhancements to our product had to do with simplicity and scale in the context of agile project management, i.e., scaling our product to support more teams and team members in a lightweight manner. More specifically, we now support several key aspects of the software lifecycle including requirements, customer requests, defects, issues, acceptance tests, and tasks - all within a single, agile project management application.
In terms of flexibility, a customer can not only configure the methodology to best meet their own internal naming conventions, they can completely customize the project and release structure to map to their unique planning and rollup reporting needs. In addition, customers now have access to our entire system via an open, web service API for custom integration and reporting purposes.
Q. You talk about iterative, feature driven development. How does V1: Agile Enterprise handle that differently from any other tool?
handle that differently from any other tool?
handle that differently from any other tool?
A: The incremental delivery of working software every iteration, typically ranging from 1-4 weeks, represents the heartbeat of an agile project. The focus is on delivering the greatest value software to the customer or business every iteration. As more and more information becomes available during a project, plans may [and we all know they often do] need to change in order to maximize that value. The challenges many teams face in this type of environment revolve around planning, managing the change, and providing reliable visibility into this change and into overall project progress.
This is what we help agile teams do. In an agile project, features serve as the primary planning asset whereas in traditional project management tools, the planning focus is on tasks, hours, and dependencies. Features are prioritized in terms of business value, with the highest value features assigned to the earliest iterations. To streamline this process, we were the very first company to introduce drag-and-drop release planning, iteration planning, and feature ranking in a web-based application for agile project teams. We continue to work every day to simplify the process of managing an agile lifecycle.
Whether it means dragging a feature from one iteration to the next, or copying 100 features and defects in to a new release, we try to help our customers perform key actions quickly and easily. "Simplifying Software Delivery" has always been the vision for both our company and the product. With every release of our software, we try to support teams in achieving this goal as best we can.
Q. What are the components of your product that allow for distributed management of Agile projects? (which is often a tall order)
A: V1: Agile Enterprise is a 100% web-based application and is therefore accessible to anyone in the world via a web browser. While a tool can never take the place of face-to-face collaboration, tools can help teams quickly capture and report on project data in a real-time, regardless of location. A key for many teams has just been in getting a majority of key project information into a single, common project repository as opposed to having to go to a project management tool, a requirements tool, a defect tracker, an issue spreadsheet, and a test case management tool.
We have customers around the world that use our product to capture features, defects, issues, tests, etc. and use those items as input into product, release and iteration planning and tracking. As a result, all projects stakeholders can now work together coordinate plans, priorities, and responsibilities in a single system. Just as easily, individual team members can log in to one system to update their daily tasks, review the features they are working on, display iteration progress, and view project status and issues.
Again, the tool nor the contents of a tool should replace an interactive planning session, a telephone call, or even IM, but now at least everyone on a team or project is operating off the same page. The tool and data are simply there to support the process that the team follows, as well as provide the most current information available at any given time to every interested stakeholder.
Posted on: March 29, 2007 11:00 PM |
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