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....
Is Planning an old idea whose time is up?
In the age of nano attention-spans of people, the tendency and respect for planning things upfront has taken a serious beating. The mainstream logic is to simply “play by the ear” because there are far too many moving parts to be completely accounted for and properly factored-in - and in any case, by the time the plan goes to execution, ground realities would have changed beyond recognition, thereby rendering the plan completely useless by that time. In software development, an inaccurate predictive long-range model such as Waterfall has been replaced by more accurate adaptive short-range Agile methods that solve the line-of-sight problem but don’t address the original problem - that of planning a large project with its own share of uncertainties. While none of those arguments might be wrong par se, we conveniently ignore the fact that that is the nature...
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...
Does your project management methodology lets you free think?
Its not about the project management methodology anymore. Frankly, it never was, even though it has triggered off some of the most senseless wars in the history of project management. Starting with Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s Scientific Management to Henry Ford‘s assembly-line based mass production system and eventually landing in a flavor-of-the-day methodology (CMM, ISO, Agile, XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban…and add your favorite one here), project management community, especially in software field, has seen it all…and still counting! All these project management methodologies have been eulogized as silver bullets in their heydays (and some still continue to be worshipped as we speak), and have subsequently been improved upon by the next wave of innovation driven by ever-evolving business needs, state of technology and the sociological changes at the workplace. However, each predecessor has been uncharitably rejected and unceremoniously relegated to trash...
Do you follow Project Management ‘religiously’ ?
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 situated in a collocated fashion, doing a lot of ‘creative work’ that can’t be very ‘accurately’ scoped, let alone managed; you probably will find ideas of formal project management a huge overkill (on time, effort, money and might even seem to stifle creativity), and you might be better off considering ‘lightweight’ methods like Agile Project Management / Scrum in the context of software development (well, nothing stops you from deploying pieces of Agile / Scrum in a non-software context - it is based on common sense after all). Small...
So you think you are a top-notch Project Manager ?
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 people who can claim to have built a pyramid). There is always a classic problem of what is the right way to build a pyramid: if you go by the much-maligned and clearly fallen out of favor ‘waterfall’ way, what happens if the King dies midway and the Pyramid is still unusable ? Worse, what if the King comes half-way down the project and sees bottom half of the pyramid and remains unimpressed with the sight and either wants to change the project specs, or worse, wants to stop the funding...
Nice video on Waterfall vs. Agile…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDDO3ob-4ZY Like this:Like Loading......
What is the Inventory of your Software Development project ?
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What is your Software Development Religion today ? And where does the Customer fit in that ?
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 Swiss Army saying to suit the reality in the software development community as: When the real-life and bookish process definition differs, it clearly shows you have not understood the bookish definition, and hence you must change the real-life until it looks like the bookish definition and then trust the bookish definition. Statutory Health Warning: Reading this blog post further could be bad for health, especially for those who love the process vocabulary more than the process intent, see the means more clearly than the ends and anyday favor the established...