Month: January 2012

Agile Project Management, Books, PMI-ACP

PMI-ACP Exam Prep Material

My PMI-ACP Book is coming along nicely and today RMC released some more content including sample questions and walked through explanations of the answers. Visit the RMC Site to access it and also sign up for future previews and special discounts. Now if I could only write this stuff as quickly as they are giving it away, I would be doing OK! 

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Agile Project Management, Books, Estimating, Events

PMBOK v5 Update.

I am overdue for providing an update on how my work on The PMBOK v5 Guide is going. Well, it is on its way. The process is slow (sometimes painfully slow) but this is because of the number of people involved and the review process used. To give an idea, here is the plan for the next 6 months: *  17 February – 20 March 2012: the exposure draft PMBOK® Guide – Fifth Edition will be open for comments *  Late February 2012: team training for our adjudication processes *  20 March 2012: our exposure draft period closes and comment adjudication begins *  20 March – 28 April 2012: teams adjudicate exposure draft comments  *  Early May – mid May […]

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Agile Project Management, Events, Metrics, Planning, Risk Management, Teams

Agile Productivity

SMEs, SM0s and the Deluded Developer Day We all want Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), but what happens if we get a Subject Matter Zeros (SM0s)?  How does that impact your schedule, and what about team members who have “other project commitments”? Before you know it, that 6 month schedule that looked pretty comfortable, is looking like a fairy tale. I recently attended a great presentation by Lee Lambert at my local PMI conference and while he was not talking about agile per say, his commentary on SMEs and part time resources struck a chord, which I would like to share. The role of the customer, the business, the Subject Matter Expert (SME) on agile projects is vital. They not only […]

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Agile Project Management, Events, Metrics

Presentation: Smart Agile Metrics

I will be presenting on “Smart Agile Metrics” at the upcoming Calgary Agile Methods User Group (CAMUG) meeting Tuesday January 10th. Here is the outline: “Collecting and reporting effective metrics can be a tricky business. Einstein captured it well when he noted "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". Software projects have a history of measuring irrelevant and even counter-productive progress tracking metrics. The "Hawthorne Effect" should teach us that we will influence what we measure, yet companies continue to overtly track things like hours worked and lines of code written, unaware that they send the message of valuing long hours over results, and discourage simplifications and healthy refactoring. Quite often the […]

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