Most of us work on projects where we know the end date or the budget--or both. But there is a category of projects where we might not know either: emergent projects. Emergent projects are change projects such as your agile transition or any other project that you have no control over. Can you apply agile to those projects? Yes. Carefully.
With the shift to a more agile, team-centric organizational structure, singling out individuals can become a cumbersome and stressful task for even the best and most experienced managers. In this article, we cover how rewards can actually backfire--and give you three rules of thumb for rewarding your best performers.
It's hard to know if we're producing systems as fast as we could produce them. We can, after the fact, always identify ways in which we "wasted" time without contributing to our desired outcomes. But why can't we identify which will be waste before the fact? Because we want to go as fast as possible!
When you’re a project manager for a traditional project, it’s easy to write a project charter. On an agile project, is that the right thing to do? Should you even use the same template? Here are some fundamental steps to get your project or iteration started on the road to success.
For an agile project to progress smoothly, the backlog must be groomed and ready for each sprint. That work must be included in your project plan. This article gives you five points to consider when planning that work.
One of the most complex issues in project management to handle is when a team struggles at getting to “done” at key milestones. This article presents the problem along with suggestions on how to combat it.
As the use of agile methods spreads into larger organizations, senior managers struggle to decide their agile adoption strategy. Here are three stories from three large Canadian banks who each took a different adoption approach.
Are you wondering what it would take to transition your organization to agile, for real? Maybe your organization has made a half-hearted attempt to transition to agile for some projects. Maybe you are the champion, but agile hasn’t gained the traction you expected by now. Consider these five tips to retrench and improve your organization’s transition.
We all need some help sometimes when introducing agile methods into a traditional organization. Fortunately, a new guide to ease the transition is available. The recently published Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide Fifth Edition acts as a Rosetta Stone for mapping and replacing traditional approaches with their agile alternatives.
Many organizations have struggled with their early agile experiments. Due to the issues faced, they typically cannot answer the simple question: “Are we ready to go agile?” This first article examines the factors that indicate whether the sponsoring organization is ready (and able) to modify the way it works to increase the chances of a successful agile project.
What are your big goals? Productivity? Speed? Happiness? All of these are understandably desirable. They also share another attribute: They all are best achieved by seeking other, lesser goals rather than by seeking them directly.
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"If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow." - Chinese Proverb |
