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What Makes a PM Software Package "Agile Friendly"?
| 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.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? 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? 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.
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Posted on: March 29, 2007 11:00 PM
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Comments (1)
Another Frequent Flyer Gadget
Categories:
Time Killers
Categories: Time Killers
Situation: You Don't Like the TSA Guys Messin With Your Stuff... Here's one for the control freak in you. This lock will let you know if the TSA guys have rifled through your bag. Not a terrific PM tool - just thought it might be interesting to you consultant types. |
Posted on: March 29, 2007 10:48 PM
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Beware The Experience-Free PM Journalist...
Categories:
Decision Making
Categories: Decision Making
Situation: You Need To 'Keep It Real' When Hiring a PM... I was just reading this article from Baseline Mag on PMP certification. It's a nice little summary of info from the PMI site with some quotes from Matt Hotle, a Gartner Analyst that I know and respect. I just wish it was written by someone who understood real world project management, because aside from Matt's comments it just perpetuates myths that people buy into all of the time.Their Primer on the PMP certification includes a "Rate This Project Manager" sidebar which gives you 6 vanilla criteria by which you can rate a potential hire. They go on to attach quantitative significance to each of their criteria in a way that probably makes sense to the layman, but adds little real world value. A quick gantthead search on "Hiring a Project Manager" will get you lots of advice that is much more useful than a journalist's summary. A great example is Mark Mulally's article Hiring Project Managers: Should PMPs Apply? Then read his blog. Compare what he thinks is important with what you found in Baseline. You'll see exactly what I mean. |
Posted on: March 29, 2007 12:09 AM
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Turn the Company Picnic into a Music Video...
Situation: You Need To Turn a Stack of Meeting Pics into Something Cool... How many meetings have you been to where someone has a PowerPoint slide show of bad digital pics cycling through checkerboard transitions @ 1 every 3 seconds. Fliptrack offers a quick way to replace those LAME-O snoozefests with a quick music video. This is a decidedly poor example (just some pics of ganttheads from the 2006 PMI NA Global Congress), but it took me less than two minutes to throw together...   |
Posted on: March 28, 2007 11:05 PM
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Many, Many of Us Use Excel...
| Situation: You Don't Want the Complexity of a Full Blown PM Software Package...
 ProjectSheet, TaskSheet, and TopSheet are really, really simple Excel-based project planning tools offered by Business Arts. Even today with literally 20 million MS Project licenses out there, MS Excel is often the line PM's scheduling tool of choice. It's not really built for that purpose, but "Accidental project managers" love it for its simplicity. The folks at Business Arts have ridden that wave and taken Excel one step further. As a Design Firm, they are highly focused on simplicity and ease of use, rather than high-end functionality. TopSheet is even a simple way to manage PPM efforts. Who's to say that's a bad thing?Chris Barnes, President and Creative Director was kind enough to share his views with us today. Here are his responses to our questions. Q: Your products are incredibly simple and straightforward, which is certainly a strength in terms of usability. They appear to basically be Excel spreadsheets with simple embedded functions. Why would a user buy these rather than just use Excel from scratch? Are there complex functions that are not readily apparent?
A: ProjectSheet and TaskSheet offer the benefits of time and cost savings. Creating a custom solution from scratch takes time, and programming requires expertise that many casual Excel users don’t have. Also, we carefully designed the interface and output of our products to be attractive and readable, so users are free to concentrate on content rather than formatting.
Our products do contain several fairly sophisticated features like concurrency, task groups, and task-level weekend settings. Because we do not use add-ins or VBA, our tools do not require installation or trigger security alerts, so they can be deployed organization-wide with a minimum of hassle.
Q: Some say simplicity is key in the creative environments where you consult. Do you feel that is true and related to your product approach? With creative projects, which elements need to be kept simple and which get more complex?
A: Simplicity is key because it helps people focus on and engage with content. We believe strongly in that approach and used our best thinking to decide what not to include in our products.
One result is an interface that enables users to spend more time thinking about their project and less time learning software.
More importantly, our approach helps users communicate effectively about their project. ProjectSheet and TaskSheet schedules aren’t cluttered with distracting formatting or extraneous information; they purposefully focus the viewer’s attention on the flow of the project. Users can always add their own worksheets or other documentation to flesh-out project details as needed.
Even on our largest creative projects, we find that it is fairly easy to specify the tasks involved; it’s far more challenging to inspire a team to work together to pursue a common goal. Human interactions are complex; we think tools should be simple and effective.
Q: Is "planning backwards" a typical approach to building a plan in your experience? If so, why?
A: ‘Planning backwards’ is both a thought process and a calculation mode in ProjectSheet.
The ‘Backward from finish’ mode in ProjectSheet is helpful when working toward a fixed deadline like a tradeshow or other event, and helps users quickly answer the question, ‘When do we have to start in order to meet the deadline?’ As tasks and duration are entered, the project schedule is calculated backwards from the target finish date to identify the earliest date the project would have to start. Once the rough schedule is established, we recommend users switch to Forward from start mode to refine and manage the project plan.
As a thought process, planning a project backwards is reverse engineering: start with a vision of the end product and break it into component parts. This approach is both typical and useful, mainly because it is easier to start planning with the most tangible piece of information you have (i.e., what the project is intended to accomplish) rather than the nebulous, ‘How do I get started?’ But its true value lies in the fact that it helps you keep the project goal in sight at all times.
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Posted on: March 27, 2007 11:20 PM
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