Month: June 2007

Agile Project Management, Metrics, Planning

Agile Interfaces – PMO Integration

I spend a fair portion of my time working with Project Management Office (PMO) and Project Support Office (PSO) groups helping them integrate agile methods. One simple concept I’d like to outline today is the idea of Agile Interfaces. Agile methods provide a great feature delivery engine, they iteratively feed on features from the backlog and produce tested functionality of high business value. To external stakeholders this also represents a daunting and unfamiliar process to connect to. Its cyclical, seemingly never ending process is about as appealing to interact with as putting your arm in a washing machine while running. However there are a couple of friendly, safe interfaces that can alleviate mid-cycle arm twisting (how we normally extract information […]

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Agile Project Management

Agile Suitability Filters

Why wouldn’t you always use agile methods? Well, shock-horror, maybe they are not always the best approach for the circumstances! So how do we decide? It is tempting to thinking that all projects should be handled in an agile way. Indeed, I am convinced that all projects would benefit from the improved collaboration and communications encouraged on agile projects. However, collaboration and communications are just two attributes of agile projects and we must consider wider parameters that influence project success or failure. I am working with the assumption that the end result we are looking for is a successful project with satisfied stakeholders. It would be better to have a successful traditional project than a failed agile project. Others might […]

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Agile Project Management, Events, Teams

Job Posting

I am looking for an experienced .NET 2.0 developer to join our team at Husky Energy. This is a challenging role on an established agile team building a complex oil pipeline management system. The skills we are looking for include: Must Have NET 2.0 (advanced) OO/design patterns skills (advanced) Experience in enterprise application development (advanced) SQL (intermediate) Unit testing (intermediate) Nice to Have       Crude Pipeline knowledge ReSharper MSBuild Subversion iBatis Developer Express suites WCF The role is a contract position for one year. The project has 18 months left to go so an extension is likely. We are using a practical set of agile techniques and have the benefit of three full time users dedicated to the project […]

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Agile Project Management, Metrics, Planning, Teams

The Pipelining Anti-Pattern

If you have analysts working ahead of development, or have testers working significantly behind development, then you may have “Pipelining” problems. Pipelining is the term used to describe the situation when business analysts are working ahead on the requirements for a future iteration; the development team is working on the current iteration, and the test team is engaged on a previous iteration. In some circumstances analysis may be several iterations ahead and testing several iterations behind. To some people this may seem an efficient use of resources with each group running at their optimal speed, unfettered by the co-ordination constraints of different groups. However from an agile and lean perspective this is problem, a bad-smell that needs fixing. Here are […]

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Agile Project Management, Leadership, Teams

Be Enthusiastic – It’s Contagious

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called “The True Role of a PM on Agile Projects”. An attribute I did not include was “Be Enthusiastic – it’s Contagious” one reason for this omission is that it is a skill that I struggle with and I did not feel qualified to talk about. My style is more reserved and I have to go outside of my comfort zone to outwardly project my eagerness. However, the fact remains that it is an important role.  If the leader of the project does not appear to show a passion for the cause then why should the other team members? Also the “- it’s contagious” portion is very important, as a social […]

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Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership

Blog Award

To my surprise, this blog won the PMISAC award for Project Management Literature last night at the 2007 Awards Gala Dinner. This is a great endorsement, I work on the blog in my spare time and it provides a large encouragement to continue and do more. I also think having a blog considered for a literary award demonstrates how progressive the PMISAC is. It was not long ago that blogs were more the domain of developers than project managers. It is very encouraging to see alternative media branches recognized.

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