Why user stories make sense?
User stories are meant to be a placeholder to initiate an early conversation between the product owner and the team on key hypotheses so that a quick validation of them could be done to refine/confirm/reject our understanding of what the customer really wants.
Role of Integrative Thinking in Project Management
The conventional wisdom is to try to find a via media but that is perhaps meekly surrendering to complexity by taking a short-cut to a suboptimal solution. He argues that the some of the most exceptional leaders do not succumb to the obvious “either/or” thinking but rather work patiently towards synthesizing the best from both of these opposing views to create a best-of-breed solution that is far superior to either of these. He calls it “integrative thinking”.
Project Management vs. Program Management
Program Management is often seen as the next logical step for seasoned project managers looking to take on bigger challenges. While project management is more about managing within boundaries of a project and gatekeeping it against anything and everything that threatens the status quo, program management is typically all about breaking those very boundaries and managing across them by taking up anything and everything that threatens the status quo.
What are agile practitioners thinking in 2011?
Shortly before the yearend holidays, couple of us from product development companies got together to discuss how software development process philosophy and methodology is changing. This was definitely an interesting session that gave an opportunity take stock of some of the things that are working or not working. We also discussed the fact that Agile is really addressing a subset of the entire business problem - to address the entire problem, we need to embrace systems thinking and lean thinking.
Why are we in this mess?
Prior to the industrial age, the world was essentially an agrarian and a trading economy. Production methods were often a craft and top secret, fiercely protected within a family and handed down from a master craftsman to his sons, and with no machinery for mass production, pretty much every product was handmade and unique, perhaps also customized, for its intended user. Industrial revolution made mass production and rapid movement of goods possible, and among other things, catapulted Britain into forefront of global economies. Gutenburg’s printing press was perhaps the first mass production system built by man. Subsequent inventions like harnessing of steam power made railways possible, spinning machines, and other advances in iron founding and chemicals pushed the envelope. However, a lot of these advances were limited to Europe and even more within the UK, which thrived on these advances and...
Our methodology is 100% pure, our result is another thing!
What is worse then an anarchy ? You might say that is the absolute abyss, but I think blind allegiance is even more dangerous (and that includes following the letter but tweaking the spirit - things like ‘creative accounting‘ or its parallels in every field). Anarchy at least allows for things to become ‘better’ in order to survive - whether it is the idealogy, resistance, or even musclepower, or any other ills (and hopefully at some point, social forces of constructive destruction take over). But in a land where unquestionable compliance and blind allegiance rule the roost, IMNSHO, is like a terminal patient off the ventilator support. When people are on their deathbed, they don’t regret things that they did but much rather the things they did not do! In project management, life is no less colorful. We have...
Codifying Agile Skills or creating more checklists ?
Did you check out the Agile Skills Projects yet ? It seems to be a new and interesting initiative to “… establish a common baseline of the skills an Agile developer needs to have, including a shared vocabulary and understanding of fundamental practices”. They talk about Agile Skills Matrix that has seven essential skills, or the Seven Pillars, organized into five skill levels. Seven Pillars include:
Are you solving the wrong project management problem ?
I just read a book titled “The eMedha Paradigm - A Project Manager’s Billion Dollar Odyssey” and felt terribly disappointed and shocked. The author paints a make-believe world in which a sadist CEO does insider trading and makes his kith and kin richer, while his technically incompetent, control-freak and sexually-deprived project manager has a field day sinking the project. The team spirit is in tatters but because of the three-year job bond, they can’t leave their jobs just yet. Sales has promised to deliver the project in 1/3x time period, and now the customer is shouting from the rooftop on grand promises that remain grossly unmet. In short, all real-world ills happening in all permutations and combinations at the same time. While this might not be entirely implausible, I am yet to find such a worst-case view of real-world. This is...
Does your project love cockroaches ?
Cockroaches just love projects. Several projects have loads of them, but most projects have at least a few of them. Software projects are notorious for breeding cockroaches that are not only hard to spot, they are harder to exterminate. They are a project manager’s worst nightmare, and despite our collective advances in project management theory and experience, we still are answerless in face of collective might of those otherwise innocuous-looking pesky little creatures that simple turn the best laid out plans and intentions into history. What are these cockroaches ? I am not referring to the ugly kitchen pest that refuses to die (it is rumored to be the only living form with capability to survive a nuclear fallout), but the Cockroach Theory, defined as:
Software trends survey…
This is an interesting update on software trends: A recent survey of more than 6,000 senior-level business leaders and software development executives found optimism for higher IT budgets and a preference for outsourcing, agile methods, and enterprise applications. In the survey, sponsored by software consulting firm SoftServe, 60 percent of respondents reported increases in 2009 IT development budgets, despite the uncertain global economic climate. Some 26 percent indicated that budgets had increased by more than 10 percent over 2008. Some 38 percent said they use some type of software development outsourcing. Of those, 67 percent used locations in India, followed by the emergence of Ukraine, China, and other Eastern European countries.