 Large teams might be inevitable in certain large endeavors, but there are several benefits of small teams. A small team can build and maintain a strong culture and a character that gets better with time. Small teams quickly learn the invaluable skills in teamwork and interdependence that lead to higher …more
At its core, productivity for a software team (often wrongly termed as programming productivity because software development is much more than mere programming) looks like a great idea. In its simplest form, it compares output of the team (amount of useful and usable software created, amount of unnecessary rework done, number of defects …more
Agile thought movement has been around in different stages of evolution (and not to mention, different vocabulary from different preachers and schools of thought) from 1960s - perhaps it always co-existed with its better-known but half-effective cousin, Waterfall, all those decades without ever becoming a mainstream / preferred method of …more
Project Management is perhaps one of the most fiercely debated and grossly misunderstood disciplines in the software field currently, hence let me throw in a disclaimer first: if you are a small team of experts and/or people well-known to each other (e.g., have worked together as a team earlier), and …more
This is the text from a recent announcement for a course by Ken Schwaber on “Flaccid Scrum - A New Pandemic?” (text underlining is mine): Scrum has been a very widely adopted Agile process, used for managing such complex work as systems development and development of product releases. When waterfall …more
Building Pyramids is one of the most common examples and metaphors in project management, and should I also add, perhaps one that is almost always discussed about by people who have practically no knowledge of construction engineering, let alone experience in building a pyramid (after all, I don’t know too many …more
Most project management frameworks and methods advocate (and actually require) ’point-estimates’ in planning and scheduling. By ‘point-estimates’, I mean there is a ‘hard number’ that seems to be etched in stone, leaving with no ‘tolerance’ or ’leeway’ for the project manager and his team. Even though we all understand that estimates are never point-estimates (and …more
No one likes surprises, least of all executives who might have given high-level commitments on project delivery to their peers in customer organizations, investors or other key stakeholders. I hold Project Managers largely responsible for poor ‘bad news management’. In most cases, there are half-baked estimates that never are a firm basis …more
Yes, you read it right…when are you planning to fail ? In the world where insatiable hunger for ‘success’ is an obsessive-complusive disorder (OCD), we don’t think of ‘failure’ much. It is shunned, scoffed at, systematically eliminated (or mitigated, at least), avoided, bypassed, ignored….everything but embraced with open mind and …more
Since times immemorial, ideas, objects and experiences of grand stature and lasting economic, social and emotional value have been created by men and women working together in teams. Granted that some extraordinary work in the fields of arts, philosophy and sciences was done by truly exceptional individuals, apparently working alone, …more
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDDO3ob-4ZY
Second part of my article on exploring how Little’s Law related to the Agile Project Management just got printed in PM World Today. Here is the abstract: Little’s Law[1] states that inventory in a process is the multiplication of throughput and the flow-time[2]. In first paper[3] of this two-part series, we took …more
My article by this title got published in PM World Today, Nov 2008 issue. Here is the abstract: Little’s Law states that inventory in a process is the multiplication of throughput and the flow-time. While this seems intuitive, it helps us establish a mathematical relationship between basic factors that govern …more
There was a question on the group Scrum Practitioners on LinkedIn if “…implementing Scrum as a whole should be our goal or would you use aspects of the Scrum methodology to realise an agile culture change ?†Looking at the disproportionately large number (with an increasing trend) of posts on …more
The Swiss Army manual says: When the map and the terrain disagree, trust the terrain. However, in software industry, there seems to be an unending effort to make sure the terrain is retrofitted so that it looks much more like the map in hand ! So, I have modified the …more
