I have to profess before I go too far into this blog, that I am a great fan of book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the great Douglas Adams.  I remember watching this on public television on the olden days, the special effects were not so grand but everything else about the program was […]

Sources of Conflict There are challenges aplenty awaiting project managers when it comes to gathering a collection of individuals assigned to eventually become a team and produce the organization’s objective as defined by the project.  The business mantra of doing more with less – often less time and certainly less resources (and available talent) do […]

We have mapped how long it takes to prepare the vehicle for testing using the histogram. We have used the Ishikawa diagram to generate ideas we wish to investigate as causing the time to be longer than we would like it to be. Our next step is to see if the ideas suggested in the […]

In our previous post, we have learned the distribution of vehicle preparation time via the visual representation known as the histogram.  This does not tell us what causes for the distribution.  If we wish to alter this distribution, we will also need to know the causes and take some action to alter.  Enter the Ishikawa […]

The daily sprint meeting has connections to our risk management as well. We have seen from the previous posting the fact we are having the meeting daily can hasten our project’s (system’s) ability to respond.  The sprint master is now asking about the obstacles or impediments to achieving the objectives of the sprint. Impediments and […]

Continuing with our communications theme and agile methods, we discuss the question, “what did you do yesterday?”  This simple question places a check in a few project management boxes starting with the mechanism for the control of the output – specifically the feedback portion of our project control system.  Learning what happened yesterday (coupled with […]

We felt the need to follow on from our previous blog on tracking testing results in the background using hidden ubiquitous spreadsheet or documents.  If all you have is a spreadsheet for tracking, then you make that visible to all relevant stakeholders.  If the company has a sanctioned or preferred way of handling “bugs” and […]

Another beneficial attribute of Agile, particularly Scrum, is the daily sprint meeting. In this very short and focused meeting that includes the immediate project team and as needed the sponsor, we will learn much about the state of our project. The questions three that are up for discourse are: What did you do yesterday? What […]

“The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate” ~ Joseph Priestley In our experience, this is one of the significant benefits of the agile approach to project management.  Agile, with the recurring sprint meetings and constant involvement and participation by the project sponsor greatly facilitates the communications process. We can rely less […]