Starting an Agile Project within a Traditional Framework

Agile methods typically don’t cover the early stages of projects very well. They often assume you are ready to start gathering requirements as user stories, or that you even have some candidate features or stories magically ready to go. This is shown by the scope coverage diagram below.      Yet for all but the smallest, most process-light organizations, there are stages of envisioning, feasibility, and setup that happen before we are ready to jump into requirements gathering. This is where many companies come unstuck with agile. Either they jump straight to stories and miss out the early project stuff and suffer disoriented stakeholders and disengaged project offices. Or they go too heavy with the upfront chartering and scope definition, […]

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2010 Training Courses and Events

2010 is shaping up to be a good year for training courses and events. I have the following public enrolment courses available through the PMI. March 10-11 Anaheim, CA April 13-14 Scottsdale, AZ September 15-16 Las Vegas, NV November 10-11 Scottsdale, AZ December 15-16 San Diego, CA  My private courses are available year round, see here for a list and course outlines, and I am also hoping to head back to Alaska this summer to teach a class for the PMI Alaska Chapter there again. As normal I’m keeping the bulk of the summer free to take full advantage of the short, but fantastic hiking and mountain biking season we get here around Calgary. I was hoping to attend the […]

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