Tutorials and tools for managing, estimating, planning and tracking software development projects: PMP, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban
In this interesting blog post, Glen Alleman discusses the concept of competency models for project managers. He lists a set of elements that should be used to assess project managers in the following areas of competence: performance measurement, status reporting, organizational processes, team building, staff development, perspective, negotiation, risk management,...
It has been 5 years since David Anderson and Rick Garber first presented the Kanban Method to a limited audience at small conference in Chicago. This session gives the Lean and Kanban community in the software development domain an opportunity for reflection on how far we’ve come in 5 years...
In this article, Christophe Le Coent discusses shared responsibilities and clear accountability in software development projects. He proposes a RACI+F matrix where the letters have the following meaning: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, Facilitate. This allows to create RACI+F matrix for the Scrum project activities for each Scrum roles. This matrix...
In this blog post, Steve Andrews discusses the usage of team velocity to plan the next Scrum sprints and how can we use it to make more informed management decisions. Using a quantitative management approach and Agile methods allows us to actually measure the impact of management decisions on the...
Steve McConnell presents 10 of the worst ways estimates go wrong and provides time-tested rules of thumb for dramatically improving estimation accuracy. The average project overruns its planned budget and schedule by 50%-80%. In practice, little work is done that could truly be called “estimation.” Many projects are scheduled using...
In this blog post, Johanna Rothman shows some of the common problem of teams that think they start using Scrum but stick to traditional project management planning. Some of the smells of this situation could be the fact that the ScrumMaster keep preparing Gantt charts for the iteration or that...
In this article, Brian Tarbox and Heather Mardis try to answer the classical question: “how long is this going to take?” They discuss the notion of velocity in Scrum and how to use it to estimate future sprints. But not all projects use the Scrum framework and people rarely record...
In this article, Robert Galen argues that traditional project managers DO need to reframe themselves and their approaches in an agile context. They must become context-based and situational in your approaches. However, “traditional” principles and techniques from the PMBOK shouldn’t be “thrown away” in agile projects.