Month: December 2008

Agile Project Management, Estimating, Metrics

Lifecycle Variables

I have written a couple of posts now (here and here) about the new PMBOK v4 guide due out soon. One of the new graphs included helps describe how project characteristics change over the project life time.  The top blue line of the graph is used to illustrate how Stakeholder Influence, Risk and Uncertainty start off high and then reduce as the project progresses. The Escalating orange line illustrates how the Cost of Changes increase dramatically over the project timeline. Quite a lot has already been written on flattening the Cost of Change curve within agile, so I will leave that for now and focus first on the top line. Before discussing ideas such as how ongoing business input in, […]

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Agile Project Management, Metrics

Velocity Signature Analysis

Most agile projects track their velocity. For the past 10 years or so I have been studying the velocity profiles of my projects and any other projects I can get data from. Velocity profiles tell a story about the project, and like signatures are unique. Tracking stories, or more normally points completed per iteration, gives the classic velocity graphs such as the one shown below. Here we can see the Projected Velocity shown by the dotted blue line and the Actual Velocity shown in dark blue. From observing 15-20 projects I have noticed the following reoccurring patterns. Am I the only one, or are these common? 

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Agile Project Management, Events, Lean

Living the Theory of Constraints

This past week I have had an opportunity to experience some hospital process control and contrast it with traditional project process controls. In doing so, I saw many instances of where today’s projects that exhibit uncertainty could be better managed via prioritization and collaborative decision making than preset plans. How did we get to Traditional Project Management?Project management is a fairly young discipline, yet because its repeatable process scales so well, and is easy to duplicate and automate; it rapidly became the dominant process for running projects. Frederick Taylor published his studies on “Scientific Management” in 1911 outlining the process of decomposing complex work into simpler and simpler steps until localized labour could be employed to perform each simple task. […]

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