Month: June 2012

Agile Project Management, Books, Events, Leadership, Teams

Calgary Presentation – Working Effectively with Off-Shored IT Resources

On Monday June 25th Calgary’s Agile Leadership Network meeting with feature Dr. Lionel Laroche presenting on “Working Effectively with Off-Shored IT Resources” the session is free, so come along if you can. The slides will be made available to those how cannot attend after the meeting at the Calgary Agile Leadership Network website Presentation Outline: "On paper, off-shoring IT work is a no-brainer – the salaries of programmers in India, Panama or Romania are a fraction of the salaries of programmers in Calgary. However, as most people who have worked with off-shored resources have learned, things are not as simple as they may seem, because managing off-shored resources is not the same as managing Canadian resources. Because people in different […]

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Agile Project Management, Games, Planning, Risk Management, Teams

Collaborative Games for Risk Management

This is the third part in a series on agile risk management; Part 1 looked at the opportunities agile methods offer for proactive risk management, while Part 2 examined the benefits of engaging the whole team in risk management through collaborative games and cautioned us about groupthink. This article walks through those games and explains how to engage a team in the first three of the six risk management steps. The PMI risk management lifecycle comprises of: Plan Risk Management Identify Risks Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis Plan Risk Responses Control Risks These phases can be addressed collaboratively via the following team exercises: Plan Your Trip (Plan Risk Management) 4Cs: Consider the Costs, Consequences, Context and Choices […]

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Agile Project Management, Estimating, Games, Leadership, Metrics, Risk Management, Teams

Agile Risk Management – Harnessing the Team

Last month we looked at how agile methods provide multiple opportunities for embracing proactive risk management. The prioritized backlog, short iterations, frequent inspections and adaptation of process map well to tackling risks early and checking on the effectiveness of our risk management approach. We want to overcome many of the correct-but-not-sufficient aspects of risk management seen too often on projects:     Poor engagement – dry, boring, academic, done by PM, does not drive enough change    Done once – typically near the start, when we know least about the project    Not revisited enough – often “parked” off to one side and not reviewed again    Not integrated into project lifecycle – poor tools for task integration    Not engaging, poor visibility – few […]

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