Month: May 2007

Agile Project Management, Events, Weblogs

Blog Award Nomination

I am very pleased to announce that this blog has been selected as a finalist in the PMI-SAC award for Project Management Literature. The other entries include Dr. Janaka Ruwanpura , Dr. George Jergeas, and Mohamed Moussa  who have written (amongst other things) some great material on decision tree simulation and civil engineering PM best practices. So, while I do not expect to win, being selected as a finalist is a great endorsement and encouraging that a PMI body recognizes agile and leadership based material. This is an emerging trend, three or four years ago agile awareness and acceptance within traditional project management was the anomaly, now it appears the norm. When I spoke at the PMI Global Congress in […]

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Agile Project Management, Leadership, Teams

Team Solving: The Under Utilized Power

All projects face problems, but fortunately your team members have the best solutions. Projects rarely go exactly to plan; they have a nasty habit of uncovering gnarly problems that were not anticipated, but need to be solved. This is illustrated nicely by Doug DeCarlo in his book Extreme Project Management. The top black line depicts the planned approach moving in orderly fashion from start to finish. The lower blue line depicts how projects really progress with side tracks and setbacks as obstacles are encountered and overcome. Yet, in attempting to solve these problems project managers too often overlook the best source of solutions, the project team. In this post I will outline why the team has the best practical solutions even […]

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Agile Project Management, Leadership, Planning, Teams

The True Role of a PM on Agile Projects

So, what does the PM do on agile projects? If the team self organizes and selects their own work from the prioritized feature list, should the PM just buy pizza and keep out of the way? Well they are short changing the team if that is all they do. Rather than a fear of role erosion, PM’s should be maximizing business value delivery and looking to broaden their skill set with more leadership practices.  This post outlines four core roles and ten core principles managers of agile projects should practise.  Working in Parallel Before we start, the transition to agile does not happen overnight. There will be a long and sometimes awkward transition period as all the project stakeholders adopt […]

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Agile Project Management, Estimating, Metrics, Planning, Teams

Large Project Risks

(Chop those large projects down to size) When I started out as a PM and had a few successful projects under my belt, I wanted to manage larger and larger projects. Now I’m looking for ways to make them smaller and limit the functionality initially tackled. This is not just laziness or a lack of ambition on my behalf, instead it is a realization that delivering business value comes from successful projects and that large projects are inherently risky and more likely to fail. Jim Johnson of the Standish Group presented some interesting metrics at the PMI Global Congress conference in Toronto a couple of years ago that confirmed my suspicion. From a study of over 23,000 projects it was […]

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Agile Project Management

Agile Contracts

Traditional project contracts are not very agile, yet we often find contracts are a part of the not so ideal real world. While the 3rd line of the agile manifesto states “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” it is sometimes difficult to convince all the external stakeholders and powers-that-be of this wisdom. The next Calgary ALPN meeting on Monday will feature Gerard Meszaros from ClearStream Consulting talking on “Are Fixed Price and Agile Mutually Exclusive?” This should be a good talk, I have known Gerard for 4-5 years and he always has a compelling message; backed up by a wealth of experience and a deep knowledge of agile methods. If you are in the Calgary region on Monday lunchtime, come along […]

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