Project Prioritization  There are two levels of prioritization for agile. The first is the product backlog – the prioritization of the scope of the project.  The second prioritization is how we populate the sprint contents.  The top priority product backlog items are used for the decomposition for the sprint, but there may be prerequisites that […]

  Personally, I find connecting what I already know to some new thing I am learning facilitates and understanding of that new thing.  We have frequently compared agile and conventional project management on our blog, for example, Epic Project Management Battle: Retrospective vs. White Book.  Today we are going to compare the WBS dictionary with […]

Simultaneous work and an Agile Approach There are ways to divide the work up using an agile approach.  This can get complicated for distributed teams but for teams that are on the same site the challenge is greatly reduced. We once worked on an embedded development project for an electronic control unit on a vehicle. […]

Risks and Communication Management A significant portion of successful project management is due to communication, so it should stand to reason that ineffective communications can be a significant source of project failures.  Everything from evoking scope and requirements, prioritizing objectives, to team building requires effective communication. Communication is used in keeping the project team in […]

There are limits to the decomposition, and for conventional projects where monitoring may be less routine (meaning not every day), it is in our best interest to decompose as far as possible to make answering any question about the status simple, yes or no rather than some vague estimate of completion (30% complete based upon […]

Product development work has variation brought on by the product, as well as the organization.  Though there are many approaches out there, prescriptions that are based upon the type of organization or the type of product.  These approaches may have some relevance but ultimately things are not so easy to allow a prescription, “take two […]

We have grand aspirations for this portion of the site.   We provide a review of Value Transformation’s growing Product Development University.  This online training area will have many topics on product development explained, such as agile, project management, product testing and many more.   Everything from the idea (cradle) through manufacturing and finally the end […]