No matter the industry or domain, there will be times when we need to quickly make a management or technical decision. Decision matrix allows us to compare a range of solutions to a defined set of criterion. A quick and easy tool to accomplish this assessment is the decision matrix, of which there are two […]
I have recently had an exchange with Thomas Cagley on LinkedIn in response to an article “The Agile Mindset“. Comments around emotional and organizational maturity were made and Thomas Cagley asked the questions about which one comes first. I said I think emotional maturity must come first. Without the ability to handle the “real” […]
Time boxed or time boxing is when we have a hard fixed time around the activity we are undertaking. For example, we may decide that our team is allowed a fixed amount of time to plan or estimate. A meeting has a fixed duration and done effectively an agenda that further breaks down the time […]
Features and Business Case The last blog post was about how we justify the project and the business case from an agile perspective along with a study from The Standish Group. The reason attaching the business case to the product backlog, or in the case of conventional project management specific requirements, is so we have […]
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 […]
The Standish Group’s 2015 Chaos Report I am pouring over the Standish Group’s 2015 issue of The Chaos Report. I really enjoy reading and that covers a variety of topics. Reading makes it possible to see things you would not normally be able to see, a glimpse of other perspectives, and sometimes it confirms what […]
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. […]
Recently I was talking with a company that has achieved the level 3 (defined) CMMI from the Software Engineering Institute that provides a measure of an organizations maturity and capability. During this conversation, I had a flash to another company that had aspirations of being a level 3 but could never make it beyond their […]