J. B. Rainsberger has written an excellent article about the usefulness of planning velocity (and the places where it is not useful as well). I highly recommend reading it, particularly if you are a manager or a project manager.
Bas Vodde has published a good article about making goal oriented action plans for agile projects. It is a nice piece of the puzzle on how to do effective retrospectives. It also nicely ties into the “Learning Circle” Reflection/Learning/Planning/Action steps.
I just read a recent article on PMHut called “Schedule Questions: Pair Programming and the PNR Curve“. There is much in this article that is important for agile project management… and much that should be avoided at all costs!
The Project Management Institute refers to three variables that can be negotiated or constrained for a given project: scope, resources and schedule. Schedule is an interesting “variable” in that we have no choice about how time flows. We can control how much scope to ask for, we can control how much money to put towards the work, but we cannot actually “buy” more time than, say, our competitors. This has important implications which deeply challenge the PMI’s PMBoK model of project management.
Okay, this is only marginally related to agile, but I thought it was interesting nevertheless: How to Write a Detailed Strategic Plan. The main connection to Agile Work, is that you need to have a clear performance goal in mind towards which you are working. This may be a great way to clarify your thoughts about such a goal.
My first iteration using Agile Work for my business development has come to a close. Here is what I did for a “demo” and retrospective.
Wednesday is nearly done and I’m looking at my list of tasks and cringing! I’ve only done a few out of the forty for this week. What’s going on?!
In software development (and in many other types of projects), there is a typical non-agile approach to estimation of project size. This method starts with a high-level understanding of the work to be done, the requirements, and uses that to make an initial estimate of the project size. This estimate is often stated in units such as man-months. There is a very important piece missing here that makes this estimate completely useless… that makes it pure fantasy.
Work can often be divided up so that the smaller pieces are valuable on their own. By dividing work this way, a team can deliver value incrementally. The team can choose a short period of time called an iteration and select a small amount of work to complete in that time. This work should be valuable on its own. For example, if a team is building something, then at the end of each iteration whatever is built is usable as it is. This means that each iteration includes all the planning and design as well as construction or creation necessary to deliver a final product or result.
In a previous entry about constant change, the idea of a horizon of predictability was introduced. This concept, along with the agile discipline of amplifying learning, suggest a strategy for addressing problems in a project.
We’ve all seen this. A one-year project in its 13th month, and the Project Manager has been reporting 80% of the tasks at 90% and has been doing so for the last 120 days. There’s no end in sight, and the customer is leaking cash every day the product fails to go into production. What can be done? Agile project management principles can help this all-too-frequent scenario.
Plan driven methodologies which attempt to mechanize the process of doing work are in opposition to the three Agile Work Principles.