Month: February 2008

Agile Project Management

PMBOK 4 – This Time It’s Iterative!

(Well, maybe a little more iterative) The current Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide is labeled “Third Edition” and was published in 2004. Every 4 years the Project Management Institute (PMI) brings out a new version and the Fourth Edition has just been released to reviewers in Exposure Draft format. I was a contributor and reviewer for version 3 and will likely submit some feedback for version 4 too. One thing that will be of interest to agile project managers is the increased acceptance of iterative lifecycles. The concepts of rolling wave planning and progressive elaboration have been in the PMBOK since at least the 2000 edition that I know of. These concepts address the idea that planning near […]

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Agile Project Management, Books, Events, Leadership, Teams

Collaboration Tools

Last week’s Calgary APLN meeting was on Team Collaboration and afterwards an attendee volunteered a really neat and useful team assessment questionnaire. Gerard Meszaros (author of XUnit Test Patterns) who also has strong project management and team collaboration knowledge, presented on “Using Collaboration to Build Team Commitment”. It was a great presentation and referenced some of the Jean Tabaka’s work from the book “Collaboration Explained”. I have known Jean since her facilitation work with DSDM in the mid 90’s and she really knows about teams, motivation and working effectively with people. Chapter 4 of her book talks about characteristics of high performance teams. After the presentation, Edgardo Gonzalez sent me a spreadsheet based on these criteria that allows quick and […]

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Agile Project Management, Books, Estimating, Events, Leadership, Lean, Metrics, Planning, Risk Management, Teams

Agile Project Leadership and More on Accreditation

Last week I taught the “Agile Project Leadership” course with Sanjiv Augustine in Manchester, UK. The course went really well and we were looked after by Ian and Dot Tudor our hosts from TCC Training and Consultancy. They have a number of training facilities around the UK and ours was Aspen House, a converted church that retained all the arched doorways and high vaulted ceilings you would hope for. It was a rare treat to teach in such nice surroundings and the church setting made evangelising agile all the more fun. In truth we were “preaching to the choir” as most of the delegates were already familiar with the benefits of agile and were looking for practical tools and more […]

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